Transnational Yoruba revivalism and the diasporic politics of heritage

Abstract

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.

Naija boy remix: Afroexploitation and the new media creative economies of cosmopolitan African youth

“…As Kamari Clarke (2007) reminds us, attention to the political economy of African diasporic cultural production is especially critical because the variance in socioeconomic status among diasporans creates problematic differences in the capacity to culturally produce and, thus, shape the imagination of Africa and African identity. The NB are certainly recipients of the privileges of their location in the West as their access to the means of producing such videos allows them to produce discourses about Nigeria and Africa from outside.…”

Safaris into Subjectivity: White Locals, Black Tourists, and the Politics of Belonging in the Okavango Delta, Botswana

“…Minority status and experiences of deep-seated racism in the United States have led many African Americans to look to Africa as both a kind of sanctuary or promised land and a source for ideological, cultural, and spiritual enrichment (Kilson 1992: 361;Adeleke 1998;Clarke Downloaded by [The Aga Khan University] at 03:43 13 December 2014 2007). As part of this paradigm, Edward has turned back (and literally returned) to Africa as his originary homeland, with his identification as a 'victim of Americanisation' suggesting he has incorporated the histories of colonialism, oppression, and slavery as an integral aspect of his identity.…”

Black Gods, White Bodies: Westerners' Initiations to Vodun in Contemporary Benin

“…The study of Yoruba Orisa religion 8 has constantly compelled scholars to understand the modes through which a religious system reproduces itself, in a contingent balance between invention and maintenance, creatively shaping subjectivities and belongings, while manifesting itself transnationally through a myriad of de‐territorialized practices, temporally and spatially sustained by an ongoing dialogue (Clarke 2004; Matory 2005). Yet, the recent proliferation of this religion outside the African continent appears to move this questioning to its limits, forcing us to continuously remap and rethink methodologies of enquiry, the meanings of homeland and diaspora, commodity making and circulation, the transformation of institutions of knowledge that allows new forms of citizenship (Clarke 2004, 2007). Within the global Yoruba Orisa religion's network, which numbers over three million adherents around the world (Clarke 2007:731), African practitioners, such as Beninese Voduists, 9 are today a minority.…”

“…Yet, the recent proliferation of this religion outside the African continent appears to move this questioning to its limits, forcing us to continuously remap and rethink methodologies of enquiry, the meanings of homeland and diaspora, commodity making and circulation, the transformation of institutions of knowledge that allows new forms of citizenship (Clarke 2004, 2007). Within the global Yoruba Orisa religion's network, which numbers over three million adherents around the world (Clarke 2007:731), African practitioners, such as Beninese Voduists, 9 are today a minority. Their marginality is not only numeric, as it epitomizes the inequalities traversing the black Atlantic.…”

“…Their marginality is not only numeric, as it epitomizes the inequalities traversing the black Atlantic. Kamari Maxine Clarke emphasizes how “Ironically, contemporary Africans have become socially displaced from, and materially reliant on, these expanding networks of symbolic production and material consumption, which are aimed at signifying markers of ancient African belonging” (2007:731). What then do Beninese priestesses and priests say to local and transnational religious communities by initiating Whites?…”