Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa

1. What Is Diasporic Religion?

30 chapter 1 What Is Diasporic Religion? We can also say of every religion that it reproduces in more or less symbolic forms the history of migrations and fusions of race and tribes, of great events, wars, establishments, discoveries, and reforms. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory We are not a diaspora, we are just trapped. Emeline Michel, Haitian singer This chapter lays out the parameters for the central theoretical issues of the book, moving from the widest to the narrowest distinctions. I examine, in turn, diaspora, diasporic religion, African Diaspora, and African diasporic religions, the latter specifically in New York City. The attempt to establish a solid theoretical footing for the starring phrase among these, diasporic religion, may appear a fool’s errand, since both diaspora and religion are highly conflicted terms. How can we cheerfully head for the mountains with only these two frayed ropes in our packs? I wager that the two ropes can be sufficiently rewoven, and woven together, to hold the needed weight. That Shared Something: Defining Diaspora Analytically The notion of diaspora has been progressively widened over the last century to include not only the dispersions of the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian populations but also diasporas as disparate as those of WHAT IS DIASPORIC RELIGION? 31 Calvinists (Weber 2002: 7), the Portuguese (Klimt and Lubkemann 2002), the Mormons (Smith and White 2004), and the New Orleans victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Gross 2006). The term has even been applied to the dispersion of individuals from a position of social valuation to one where little is accorded them, as in “the sexual diaspora of older women” (Merkin 2006: 18)—the experience of being sexually “in exile.”1 Suddenly, it appears, everyone is in diaspora. Well, why not? We all came from somewhere else and are at least dimly enough aware of it to be able to call up sentiments about our origins. Ethnic revivals are at least in part a reactive move, a standard means of vying for a fair share of the socioeconomic pie (Barth 1969; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Rumbaut and Portes 2001: 5; Baumann 2000; Berking 2003), and diaspora has become their reliable vehicle. The practical, colloquial use of the word suggests affiliations by virtue of biological descent, which allegedly transmit blood continuity across space: The Jewish diaspora, from this perspective, is the set of people whose families were from, but then were exiled or otherwise departed from, Israel during dispersions under Babylonia, Rome, or other conquerors. The Irish diaspora is built of the descendants of the families that left Ireland during the potato famines of the nineteenth century, and so on. This concept inspires groups and galvanizes political mobilizations, but for analytical and comparative purposes it falls short on at least two counts. First, in this view, there exist natural groupings of humans who, through emigration, inevitably become diasporas. But there are no such natural groups and, it follows, no natural diasporas, either. The second obvious problem with the everyday uses of diaspora is that the category is overly broad. It is true that if we go back far enough, all human beings have their origins in East Africa (Palmer 1998); but the assertion that we are all members of an East African diaspora is not useful.2 Although we all have ancestors from that region, that memory is not part of our conscious experience; nor is it constitutive, so far as we know, of our bodily habitus; nor is each of us seen by others as a member of that category. Folk invocations of diaspora fail to specify its cultural particularity: it depends not merely on having a family tree that sprouted in another place but also on having a double consciousness in relation to place. For members of a diaspora, that awareness is central, even actively conjured in their lived experience. They feel a gap between here and there, where they are “really from.” They may even value that gap, seeing it not as a deficiency but as a resource or mark of distinction, and actively cultivate a sense of it (Malkki 1997: 62). 32 WHAT IS DIASPORIC RELIGION? The prevalence of these confusing folk usages, not to mention the mixed approaches of analytical meanings—as social form, as type of consciousness, as mode of cultural production (Vertovec 2000: 142)— suggests that we need to spend some time giving boundaries to...