Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

Preface

xvii PR EFAC E IN OYOT U N J I A FR ICA N V I L L AGE , nestled off the coast of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, Her Royal Grace Iyashanla beckoned me to wait as she performed a ritual divination in search of a “new name.” Revealed for me was the Yoruba name Ifasanu—“Ifa Has Mercy.”1 After more than a decade of archival and ethnographic research (1994–2009); thousands of miles of travel throughout the United States, Nigeria, and Cuba; steadfast attendance at Yoruba-related ritual ceremonies and national and international conferences, along with hours of richly textured interviews with African American and Latino/a Yoruba practitioners, Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism has indeed culminated in a gift of Ifa’s mercy. This work is not simply a compilation of research. It represents an “experience of research” and an exercise in lived history gathered among communities of African descent in North America whose religious identities, inimitable practices, and shifting social realities form the center of my scholarly investigations.2 Similar to Brazilian Candomblé practitioners’ “struggles for cultural freedoms” in the early twentieth century, black North Americans in the 1950s and 1960s “pioneered the politicization of African-based cultures as an important aspect of their struggle for self-determination.”3 Practitioners, as historian Kim Butler suggests, created a transformative discursive space where “African identity became an articulation of personal choice, rather than an indicator of birthplace.”4 preface xviii At its core, this book undertakes the study of a religious symbol— Africa—as historian of religions Charles H. Long critically theorized it close to forty years ago and examines it within the historical context of an extrachurch black-nationalist tradition that chose to revitalize this religious symbol as an effective strategy for mobilization in the second half of the twentieth century.5 As a study in dynamic symbolism, it “allows multiple, often competing, interpretations” of Africa to emerge rather than seeking one definitive historical truth.6 It chronicles the voices of African Americans and their journeys to and through the complex alternative meanings of Yoruba in the United States as its production includes, but remains unbounded by, religious practice, cultural appropriations, and distinct diasporic racial ontologies. It also encourages new theorization on the complex relationship between religion and geo-symbolism, examining the ways physicality and land (i.e., Africa, Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, and so forth) are infused with “geo-theological” meaning and geosacrality . By negotiating a complicated association with distant origins, blurred genealogies, reconstituted identities, and subaltern yearnings, Yoruba Americans framed new discourses on how Africa could be seen as what Ernst Cassirer calls an “index symbol.”7 Africa as index symbol ultimately became envisaged as the transubjective center of a religionationalist movement in the New World. Through African reflections of God, they entered into a new religious correspondence that brought new names and new experiences to the history of Yoruba religious studies, thus expanding the geographical, ideological, and theological landscape of Yoruba locales across the globe. Yoruba Traditions is a study that examines the performativity of Africa as enacted within a wider “theatricality of nationalism.”8 It seeks to understand the “Pan-Yoruba Diaspora” and its multiple articulations (Ifa, Ocha, Santería, Lucumi, Orisa, Orisha) not as a single fixed religious tradition but as a global religious complex developed within varying “socioreligious locations.”9 Within these various geographical “embodiments of Yoruba religious culture,” innovation, dynamism, and fluidity in practice are all diversely expressed.10 What have come to be known as Yoruba religious cultures in North America, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and parts of Europe can best be understood not as one rigidly bounded religion but as “a decentralized network of lineages, cults, and disparate public and private ritual practices that readily intermingle across definitional preface xix boundaries with other religions.”11 Because of the “emergence of Yoruba as the emblem of the Africanization of the Americas,”12 we must, as anthropologist J. Lorand Matory advises, understand Yoruba worship not as a permanent or predetermined tradition but “instead amid its modern political, economic, and ideological conditions.”13 The orisa acquire significance less in fixed historical domains than in their meaning as living entities across the globe. Thus, orisa worship in the twenty-first century cannot be easily relegated to a single geographical region but exists instead in what Eugenio Matibag identifies as the domain of the “extraterritorial”14 and comprises “multicultural...