Annotated Bibliography

Cláudio Daflon

Looking at the Yoruba Diaspora as a study of both sides of the Atlantic and taking

into account the possibility of conceptualizing a “Yoruba transatlantic nation”, my

proposal is to study the development of Afro-American religions in Cuba and Brazil,

focusing on its connection to the Yoruba tradition, the process of “creolization”, and the

transnational perspectives explored by recent scholars of different spheres of knowledge.

I’m particularly interested in the shifts in religions such as Candomblé, Santería and

Umbanda, and the relation with the modernization discourses in those countries.

Books

Alonso, Miguel Che. The Development of Yoruba Candomble Communities in Salvador, Bahia, 1835-1986. Palgrave Macmillian, 2014. (forthcoming)

It derives from the author’s dissertation and it is an attempt to bring together the many fragments of history concerning the Yoruba religious community and their rise to prominence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. It focuses mainly on the works of early Bahian ethnographers as primary sources, while also incorporating newspaper accounts, police records, oral interviews, and a variety of other innovative forms of evidence. 

Brown, Diana DeG. Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986.

Brown explores the history and development of the syncretistic Brazilian religion of Umbanda, from its beginnings in Rio de Janeiro during the 1920's to the late 1970s, examining its changing spectrum of practices, followers, and beliefs. She demonstrates how umbanda emerged during a period of rapid urban growth and how it has been transformed from extreme marginality to legitimacy and social acceptance.

Clark, Mary Ann. Where Men Are, Wives and Mothers Rule: Santeria Ritual Practices and Their Gender Implications. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005.

This study demonstrates how our ideas of religious beliefs and practices change in the light of gender awareness. Exploring the philosophy and practices of the Orisha traditions (principally the Afro-Cuban religious complex known as Santería) as they have developed in the Americas, Clark suggests that, unlike many mainstream religions, these traditions exist within a female-normative system in which all practitioners are expected to take up female gender roles.

Clarke, Kamari Maxine. Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Focus in the United States and Nigeria; it is an ethnographic study about a Yorùbá revivalist community founded in 1970 in South Carolina and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yorùbá òrìsà voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. 

Falola, Toyin and Matt D. Childs, eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005.

A collection that aims to examine the legacy of the African diaspora focusing on the Yoruba experience in Africa and the Americas, primarily during the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The chapters share some common ideas such as the importance of study both sides of the Atlantic, the complexity of Yoruba ethnic classification and the concept of a “transatlantic nation”.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

The author proposes scholars to move away from narrowly national or ethnically exclusive frameworks. He argues that the development of black culture in the Americas and Europe is a historical experience that can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons.

Kraay, Hendrik. Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics: Bahia, 1790s to 1990s. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

This book is about the relationship of Afro-Bahia to Brazilian society. Kraay states that one of the main objectives in the book is to demonstrate how Afro-Bahians struggled to create a meaningful culture in an often hostile environment.

Lovejoy, Paul E. and David Trotman, eds. Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora. London: Continuum, 2003.

This collection problematizes ethnicity and diaspora, exploring issues of identity, experience, expectations, language of communications, religion, the role of homeland and the image of homeland. There are several chapters addressing the construction or reconstruction of ethnicity among groups identified as “Nagô” and “Mina” in Brazil, who elsewhere were to become known as Yoruba.

Matory, James Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.

This book conceptualizes Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé as simultaneously the product and one of the greatest producers of a transoceanic culture and political economy known as “the Black Atlantic”. Matory makes a case for the agency of African slaves and their descendants in building and maintaining institutions based on what they understood as African authenticity.

Murphy, Joseph M. and Mei-Mei Sanford, eds. O9sun across the Waters a Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

The chapters explore Yoruba religion by documenting Òsun religion, which presents a dynamic example of the resilience and renewed importance of traditional Yoruba images in negotiating spiritual experience, social identity, and political power in contemporary Africa and the African diaspora. There are specific chapters both on Cuba and Brazil

Otero, Solimar. Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas. Albany: SUNY, 2013.

The authors in the volume look for connections between orisa religion, art and practice in interdisciplinary and transnational ways. Their works are related to discourse and practice of Yemoja traditions and their connections to national identity, gender, sexuality and race.

Palmié, Stephan. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Durham [N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

The book focus on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, demonstrating that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them.

Sandoval, Mercedes Cros. Worldview, the Orichas, and Santeria Africa to Cuba and Beyond. Univ Press of Florida, 2009.A recent synthesis of Santería. Sandoval explores how it emerged and developed in Cuba out of transplanted Yoruba beliefs and continues to spread and adjust to changing times and contexts. Sandoval examines how practitioners have adapted received beliefs and practices to reconcile them with new environments, from plantation slavery to exile in the United States.

Tishken, Joel E., Toyin Falola, and Akintunde Akinyemi, eds. Sàngó in Africa and the African Diaspora (African Expressive Cultures). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.

This is the third collection of essays on a major Yoruba orisa that Indiana University Press has produced over recent years. Like its predecessors on Ogun (1989, revised edition 1997) and Osun (2001), it covers both Africa and the New World, and is interdisciplinary, ranging from history and anthropology to literary and cultural studies. One of the important contributions of the collection is to show that contrary to what is several times stated in this book, Sango was not a pan-Yoruba deity. Rather, up to the late nineteenth century he was regarded as alien and intrusive over a large swathe of eastern Yorubaland.

Articles

Cole, George. "“Transcultureo cubano”: la santería, el negrismo y la definición de la identidad cultural cubana a comienzos del siglo XX." Dissidences 3, no. 5 (2012): 5.

Investigates the idea of afrocubanidad in Cuban literature and its connections to religious practices related to Santería.

Engler, Steven, “Umbanda and Africa”, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol.15, No.4 (May 2012), 301-322.

It argues that scholarship on Umbanda (a Brazilian hybrid of Candomble, Kardecist Spiritism, and popular Catholicism, with romanticized indigenous elements) manifests certain limitations that lead insufficient emphasis on the religious tradition’s internal doctrinal, ritual, and organizational variation. It compares the complex and ambivalent place of African traditions in Umbanda and Candomble, highlightning the extent to which Umbanda has seen as derivative, more distant from Africa.

Frigerio, Alejandro. “Umbanda and Batuque in the Southern Cone: Transnationalization as Cross-Border Religious Flow and as Social Field.” IN Cristina Rocha and Manuel A. Vasquez, The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, Brill, 2013, 165-195.

This chapter describes the growth of umbanda in Argentina, analyzing it within a transnational frame of reference. The chapter discusses the growth of Afro-Brazilian religions in the Southern Cone as an example of transnationalization from below, one that is not primarily caused by immigration, since these religions were not taken to Argentina or Uruguay by Brazilian migrants.

Olmos, Lioba Rossbach de. “Los orishas con sus espacios y los espacios de los orishas: Acerca de la relocalización de la santería en nuevos entornos”. Batey, Vol.1, No1 (2010).

About the transplantation of santería to other spaces and the idea of “re-territorialization”. It can help me in parallels with the transplantation of umbanda from Brazil to South American countries.

Wirtz, Kristina. “Santeria in Cuban national consciousness: a religious case of the doble moral.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 9 No.2 (2004): 409-438.

A essay the development of Santería in contemporary Cuba as a result of a pluri-conceptual interaction; as a sacred practice, a type of folklore, and a superstition. The author develops the notion of meta-culture, or the idea that those interpretations of Santería are related to distinct concepts of cubanidad.