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The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its
rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories
shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of
violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining
the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead,
the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals
in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political
developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity
politics. Contributors address topics that range from the
ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the
contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary
ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in
Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie
these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences
have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have
been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean.
Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul
Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore,
Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering,
Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen
The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its
rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories
shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of
violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining
the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead,
the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals
in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political
developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity
politics. Contributors address topics that range from the
ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the
contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary
ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in
Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie
these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences
have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have
been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean.
Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul
Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore,
Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering,
Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen
In Obeah and Other Powers, historians and anthropologists consider
how marginalized spiritual traditions-such as obeah, Vodou, and
Santeria-have been understood and represented across the Caribbean
since the seventeenth century. In essays focused on Cuba, Haiti,
Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the
wider Anglophone Caribbean, the contributors explore the fields of
power within which Caribbean religions have been produced,
modified, appropriated, and policed. The "other powers" of the
book's title have helped to shape, or attempted to curtail,
Caribbean religions and healing practices. These powers include
those of capital and colonialism; of states that criminalize some
practices and legitimize others; of occupying armies that rewrite
constitutions and reorient economies; of writers, filmmakers, and
scholars who represent Caribbean practices both to those with
little knowledge of the region and to those who live there; and,
not least, of the millions of people in the Caribbean whose
relationships with one another, as well as with capital and the
state, have long been mediated and experienced through religious
formations and discourses. Contributors. Kenneth Bilby, Erna
Brodber, Alejandra Bronfman, Elizabeth Cooper, Maarit Forde,
Stephan Palmie, Diana Paton, Alasdair Pettinger, Lara Putnam, Karen
Richman, Raquel Romberg, John Savage, Katherine Smith
In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the
evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and
displaced, transnational space. It considers the imagined community
in the islands as its psycho-social homeland, while simultaneously
pursuing different cultural strategies of redefining and resisting
colonial 'homeland' conventions (which Kamau Brathwaite
appropriately termed the 'inner plantation'). Thus, the
Trans-Caribbean is suspended in a double-dialectic, which opposes
both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the
romanticized, yet colonialized, 'inner plantation, ' whose
transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an
illusion. Given this, cultural production and migration remain at
the vortex of the Trans-Caribbean. The construction of cultural
products in the Trans-Caribbean understood as a collection of
social and new migratory practices both reflects and contests
post-colonial metropolitan hegemonies. Following Arjun Appadurai's
distinction, these homogenizing and heterogenizing counter-trends
in Trans-Cariabbean spaces can be observed through cultural
transactions manifesting themselves as ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, financescapes, cityscapes, ideoscapes, etc. For the
purposes of this book the editors invited anthropologists,
sociologists, political scientists, linguists, liberal arts and
gender studies specialists, as well as cultural and literary
historians to begin drawing some of the diasporic trajectories on
the huge canvas of cultural production throughout the
Trans-Caribbean.Constructing Vernacular Culture in the
Trans-Caribbean will find its audience among scholars in cultural
studies, migration, literary theory, and cultural criticism who
have a special interest in Caribbean and Latin American Studies, as
well as among students and scholars of migration and
postcolonialism and postmodernity in general."
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