Spiritist Mediumship as Historical Mediation
African-American Pasts, Black Ancestral Presence, and Afro-Cuban Religions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3933192 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elizabeth Pérez (0000-0001-6460-7600) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 330-365 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Religion in Africa (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-4200 • E-ISSN: 1570-0666 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/157006611x604760 |
| OpenAlex | W2085414040 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 17 |
| References cited | 34 |
The scholarship on Afro-Atlantic religions has tended to downplay the importance of Kardecist Espiritismo. In this article I explore the performance of Spiritist rituals among Black North American practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions, and examine its vital role in the development of their religious subjectivity. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research in a Chicago-based Lucumí community, I argue that through Spiritist ceremonies, African-American participants engaged in memory work and other transformative modes of collective historiographical praxis. I contend that by inserting gospel songs, church hymns, and spirituals into the musical repertoire of misas espirituales, my interlocutors introduced a new group of beings into an existing category of ethnically differentiated 'spirit guides'. Whether embodied in ritual contexts or cultivated privately through household altars, these spirits not only personify the ancestral dead; I demonstrate that they also mediate between African-American historical experience and the contemporary practice of Yorùbá- and Kongo-inspired religions
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Ethnography · Historiography · History of religions · Literature · Musical · Praxis · Sacred music · Scholarship · Sociology · Subjectivity · Transformative learning · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy
Residues of History, Affect, and the Resonance of Revolutionary Spirits in Two Cuban Forms of Spiritism
Telegraph Spirits and Muertos Chinos
Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh
Put the Brassiere on the Cross
Possessed by a slave, not slavery
Beyond Conversion
Latent Profile Analysis to Survey Positive Mental Health and Well-Being
From the margins in
Staging transformation
Tourism research with ‘double-eyes’
Reclaiming Self-care
That Further by Faith
Reincarnation in America
Entre las aguas/Between the Waters
Residual Transcriptions
Ambiguous noses and feminine affectations
Contentious Diasporas
Remaking Respectability
Speaking With the DeadExplorations in Literature and History
Prayer Has Spoiled Everything
Vision, Race, and Modernity
Silencing the Past
Shakespearean Negotiations
Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte
Ecstatic Religion
Mapping Yorùbá Networks
Espiritismo in the Puerto Rican Community
Boundaries are Made for Crossing
The Edge of Islam
Indian Altars of the Spiritual Church
That Event, This Memory
Governing Man-Gods
Inscriptions in the Dust
Shards of Love
Signifyin(g) Ritual
Between Memory and History
Ritual Piracy or Creolization with an Attitude
Free to Be a Slave
Divining the Past
The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby
Herskovits's Heritage
Ritual
Horrific Comedy
Versions of the Dead
Spirit Possession Revisited
Conjuring the past
Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of the Orisha Religion in Africa and the New World (Nigeria, Cuba and the United States)
It's All To Do With Words
Historiography as exorcism
An Atlantic Genealogy of 'Spirit Possession
| Unique citing works | 17 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,21 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2024 (13) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |