The Sacred Language Of The Abakua

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496829476
Total Pages : 463 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Sacred Language of the Abakuá written by Lydia Cabrera and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-12-28 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 0803264380
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Afro-Cuban Tales written by Lydia Cabrera and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As much a storyteller as an ethnographer, Lydia Cabrera was captivated by a strange and magical new world revealed to her by her Afro-Cuban friends in early twentieth-century Havana. In Afro-Cuban Tales this world comes to teeming life, introducing English-speaking readers to a realm of tenuous boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, deities and mortals, the spiritual and the seemingly inanimate. Here readers will find a vibrant, imaginative record of African culture transplanted to Cuba and transformed over time, a passionate and subversive alternative to the dominant Western culture of the Americas. In this charmed realm of myth and legend, imaginative flights, and hard realities, Cabrera shows us a world turned upside down. In this domain guinea hens can make dour Asturians and the king of Spain dance; little fat cooking pots might prepare their own meals; the pope can send encyclicals about pumpkins; and officials can be defeated by the shrewdness of turtles. The first English translation of one of the most important writers on African culture in the Americas, the collection provides a fascinating view of how African traditions, myths, stories, and religions traveled to the New World?of how, in their tales, Africans in the Americas created a New World all their own.

Author : David H. Brown
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000008185
Total Pages : 467 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Light Inside written by David H. Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 2003, The Light Inside is a ground-breaking study of an Afro-Cuban secret society, its sacred arts, and their role in modern Cuban cultural history. Enslaved Africans and creoles developed the Abakuá Society, a system of men’s fraternal lodges, in urban Cuba beginnings in 1836. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the country, the book’s novel approach builds on close readings of dazzling Abakuá altars, chalk-drawn signs, and hooded masquerades. It looks at the art history of Abakuá altars, not only tracing changing styles but also how they evolve through cycles of tradition and renovation. The Light Inside reflects the essence of the artists’ creativity and experience: through adornment, altars project the powerful spirituality of Abakuá practice, an aesthetic strategy. The book also traces a biography of Abakuá objects – their shifting forms and meanings – as they participated in successive periods of Cuban cultural history. The book constructs close rhetorical and visual analyses of changing representations of the Abakuá, spanning nineteenth-century arts and letters, modern ethnographic texts, museum displays, paintings, and late twentieth century commercial kitsch. This interdisciplinary work combines art history, African Diaspora, cultural studies and cultural anthropology with Latin American.

Author : Ivor L. Miller
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1604738146
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Voice of the Leopard written by Ivor L. Miller and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-01-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role in the history of Cuba. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross River basin. Instead, each settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society called Ékpè, or "leopard," which was the highest indigenous authority. Ékpè lodges ruled local communities while also managing regional and long-distance trade. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to colonial Cuba, reorganized their Ékpè clubs covertly in Havana and Matanzas into a mutual-aid society called Abakuá, which became foundational to Cuba's urban life and music. Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership. Voice of the Leopard is an unprecedented tracing of an African title-society to its Caribbean incarnation, which has deeply influenced Cuba's creative energy and popular consciousness. This book is sponsored by a grant from the InterAmericas(r)/Society of Arts and Letters of the Americas, a program of the Reed Foundation.

Author : María Teresa Vélez
Publisher : Temple University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781439906156
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Drumming for the Gods written by María Teresa Vélez and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Maria Oggun Gbemi
Publisher : Lulu.com
ISBN 13 : 1300405554
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Anagó Language of Cuba written by Maria Oggun Gbemi and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the Anagó language of Cuba. Based on over 25 years of field research in Cuba, Venezuela and the United States. The Anagó language is used in Lucumí religious ceremonies and celebrations in Cuba and throughout the diaspora. Includes a historical and linguistic overview along with examples of Anagó from academic, folkloric and religious context.

Author : David H. Brown
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000124371
Total Pages : 870 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Santería Enthroned written by David H. Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-24 with total page 870 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its emergence in colonial-era Cuba, Afro-Cuban Santería (or Lucumí) has displayed a complex dynamic of continuity and change in its institutions, rituals, and iconography. Originally published in 2003 Santería Enthroned combines art, history, cultural anthropology, and ethnohistory to show how Africans and their descendants have developed novel forms of religious practice in the face of relentless oppression. Focusing on the royal throne as a potent metaphor in Santería belief and practice it shows how negotiations among ideologically competing interests have shaped the religion’s symbols, rituals, and institutions from the nineteenth century to the present. Rich case studies of change in Cuba and the United States, including a New Jersey temple and South Carolina’s Oyotunji Village, reveal patterns of innovation similar to those found among rival Yoruba kingdoms in Nigeria. Throughout, the book argues for a theoretical perspective on culture as a field of potential strategies and "usuable pasts" that actors draw upon to craft new forms and identities – a perspective that will be invaluable to all students of the African Diaspora.

Author : Katia Ayón
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9788475069166
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Belkis Ayon: Kname written by Katia Ayón and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This catalogue raisonné provides a complete account of the life and work of Cuban artist Belkis Ayón (1967-1999). Working through the worst years of Cuba's post-Soviet economic crisis, Ayón developed her engraving and serigraph technique using collaged paper, and mined Afro-Cuban religious traditions to create an independent and powerful visual iconography.

Author : Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814762573
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Creole Religions of the Caribbean written by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-07-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions developed in the Caribbean region Creolization—the coming together of diverse beliefs and practices to form new beliefs and practices—is one of the most significant phenomena in Caribbean religious history. Brought together in the crucible of the sugar plantation, Caribbean peoples drew on the variants of Christianity brought by European colonizers, as well as on African religious and healing traditions and the remnants of Amerindian practices, to fashion new systems of belief. Creole Religions of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions that have developed in the region. From Vodou, Santería, Regla de Palo, the Abakuá Secret Society, and Obeah to Quimbois and Espiritismo, the volume traces the historical–cultural origins of the major Creole religions, as well as the newer traditions such as Pocomania and Rastafarianism. This second edition updates the scholarship on the religions themselves and also expands the regional considerations of the Diaspora to the U. S. Latino community who are influenced by Creole spiritual practices. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini–Gebert also take into account the increased significance of material culture—art, music, literature—and healing practices influenced by Creole religions.

Author : Dalia Quiros-Moran
Publisher : AuthorHouse
ISBN 13 : 1438980973
Total Pages : 698 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Guide to Afro-Cuban Herbalism written by Dalia Quiros-Moran and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guide to Afro-Cuban Herbalism is aimed to serve as a reference tool for practitioners of the various african based traditions such as Afro-Cuban Orisha/Ifa Worship, Vodou, Camdomble, et al. This book provides extensive information on the medicinal, religious and magical uses of 700 plants.