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Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume II, Orisa, Stewart scrutinizes the West African heritage and religious imagination of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and explores their meaning-making traditions in the wake of slavery and colonialism. She investigates the pivotal periods of nineteenth-century liberated African resettlement, the twentieth-century Black Power movement, and subsequent campaigns for the civil right to religious freedom in Trinidad. Disrupting syncretism frameworks, Stewart probes the salience of Africa as a religious symbol and the prominence of Africana nations and religious nationalisms in projects of black belonging and identity formation, including those of Orisa mothers. Contributing to global womanist thought and activism, Yoruba-Orisa spiritual mothers disclose the fullness of the black religious imagination's affective, hermeneutic, and political capacities.
List of contents
List of Abbreviations Used in Text ix
Note on Orthography and Terminology xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction to Volume II 1
1. I Believe He Is a Yaraba, a Tribe of Africans Here: Establishing a Yoruba-Orisa
Nation in Trinidad 9
2. I Had a Family That Belonged to All Kinds of Things: Yoruba-Orisa Kinship Principles and the Poetics of Social Prestige 52
3. “We Smashed Those Statues or Painted Them Black”: Orisa Traditions and Africana Religious
Nationalism since the Era of Black Power 83
4. You Had the Respected Mothers Who Had Power! Motherness, Heritage Love, and Womanist Anagrammars of Care in the Yoruba-Orisa Tradition 147
5. The African Gods Are from Tribes and
Nations: An Africana Approach to Religious Studies in the Black Diaspora 221
Afterword.
Orisa Vigoyana from Guyana 249
List of Abbreviations Use in Notes 255
Notes 257
Bibliography 305
Index 327
About the author
Dianne M. Stewart
Summary
Dianne M. Stewart analyzes the sacred poetics, religious imagination, and African heritage of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
