The scholarship on Afro-Atlantic religions has tended to downplay the importance of Kardecist Espiritismo. In this article I explore the performance of Spiritist rituals among Black North American practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions, and examine its vital role in the development of their religious subjectivity. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research in a Chicago-based Lucumí community, I argue that through Spiritist ceremonies, African-American participants engaged in memory work and other transformative modes of collective historiographical praxis. I contend that by inserting gospel songs, church hymns, and spirituals into the musical repertoire of misas espirituales, my interlocutors introduced a new group of beings into an existing category of ethnically differentiated ‘spirit guides’. Whether embodied in ritual contexts or cultivated privately through household altars, these spirits not only personify the ancestral dead; I demonstrate that they also mediate between African-American historical experience and the contemporary practice of Yorùbá- and Kongo-inspired religions.
This article assesses the empirical and conceptual contributions of J. Lorand Matory's Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (BAR) and of his first monograph, Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Ọyọ-Yoruba Religion. The bearing of these texts on subsequent research in Afro-diasporic traditions is explored through an autoethnographic account that emphasizes the demand for a post-Eliadean style of comparativism, the disciplining function of the university, and social positionality as a condition for influence to manifest. The combination of these factors supports Matory's thesis in the present issue of this journal concerning the interplay of biography and belonging in the critical reception of BAR. The article concludes by asserting the inadequacy of debt (along with other economic metaphors) for the expression of intellectual impact, and casts the act of criticism as externalizing an intimate internal dialogical process.
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