Feeling Diaspora in Harlem and Havana

Santería Copresence and the Making of African Diaspora Bodies

“…Scholars of African diaspora religions have documented the strategic ontologies that have emerged within histories of racial violence, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism (Brandon ; Brown ; de la Torre ; Palmié ; Routon , ), and they have referenced these flows of power and resistance within transnational and diasporic projects of reconciliation and recuperation (Clarke ; Johnson ; Olupona and Rey ; Mann and Bay ; Matory ). African‐ inspired (Ochoa ) diasporas have been conceptualized as relations rather than as a (singular) condition (see Brown ), and more recently, diaspora has been conceived historically as a feeling (Guridy ). Yet these discussions of diaspora have elided how embodied sensings of copresences might transform the very conception of being from within particular racial schemas (see Matory )…”