were embattled over the legitimacy of the concept of citizenship-a debate that was preceded by those writing about the complexities of Latino/a as well as Caribbean transnational migration (Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Blanc 1994;Sutton and Chaney 1987) and the resultant complexities of hybridity and borderlands (Anzaldúa 1987). The debate that followed in Current Anthropology in 1995 propelled the discussion further. It clarified what was at stake in reconceptualizing the classification of national belonging and pushed scholars to contend with power through the ways people resignify meaning and produce new forms of socialities outside of and in relation to the statecraft. This engagement called into question the prevailing literature that presumed an omnipotence of the state; it shifted the gaze to an engagement with other long standing formations-migration from the South to the North, dispossession, refugeeism, pan-Africanism and various forms of internationalism-that produced new forms of exclusions as well as innovative possibilities for reimagining the locus of social and political authority. It was about the complexities of powerits circulation and its centrality within and beyond the state. The stakes were high in this debate and the issues were made more difficult by the fledgling globalization literature which had begun to articulate social changes in relation to the demise of the nation state and shifts toward imagining new possibilities (
This article explores the making of social membership in U.S.‐based deterritorialized contexts and interrogate the ways that black‐Atlantic diasporic imaginaries are intertwined to produce transnational notions of linkage. In charting a genealogy of a transnational orisa movement that came of age in a moment of black‐nationalist protest, I pose questions about how such a study should be understood in relation to ethnographies of global networks. I argue that, despite their seemingly thin representations of broad forms of linkage, transnational orisa networks produce culturally portable practices that articulate important transformations: They shape institutions through which new forms of religious knowledge are producing significant breaks with older forms.
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