Bøger i New World Diasporas serien

This book and accompanying compact disc provide a rare excursion in the innovative ways a community of Haitian migrants to South Florida has maintained religious traditions and familial connections. It demonstrates how religion, ritual, and aesthetic practices affect lives on both sides of the Caribbean, and it debunks myths of exotic and primitive vodou (often spelled "e;voodoo"e;), which have long been used against Haitians. As Karen Richman shows, Haitians at home and in migrant settlements make ingenious use of audio and video tapes to extend the boundaries of their ritual spaces and to reinforce their moral and spiritual anchors to one another. The book and CD were produced in collaboration to give the reader intimate access to this new expressive media. Sacred songs are recorded on tapes and circulated among the communities. Migrants are able to hear not only the performance sounds--drumming, singing, and chatter--but also a description, as narrators tell of offerings, sacrifices, prayers, and the exchange of possessions. Spirits who inhabit the bodies of ritual actors are aware of the recording devices and personally address the absent migrants, sometimes warning them of their financial obligations to family members in Haiti. The migrants' dependence on their home village is dramatically reinforced while their economic independence is restricted. Using standard ethnographic methods, Richman's work illuminates the connections among social organization, power, production, ritual, and aesthetics. With its transnational perspective, it shows how labor migration has become one of Haiti's chief economic exports. A volume in the series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington

In 1896, Wenceslao Galvez y Delmonte fled the violence of Cuba's war for independence and settled in Tampa. He soon made his new home the focus of a work of costumbrismo, the Spanish-language genre built on closely observing the everyday manners and customs of a place.Translated here into English, Glvez's narrative mixes evocative descriptions with charming commentary to bring to life the early Cuban exile communities in Ybor City and West Tampa. The writer's sharp eye finds the local characters, the barber shops and electric streetcars, the city landmarks and new Cuban enclaves. One day, Glvez offers his thoughts on the pro-independence activities of community leaders like Martn Herrera and Fernando Figuerdo. On another, our exiled bourgeois intellectual author wryly recounts his new life as a door-to-door salesman and lector reading aloud to workers in a cigar factory.This scholarly edition includes photographs and newspaper clippings, a foreword on Glvez's extraordinary pre-exile years, extensive notes to the translation, and a wealth of other supplementary material putting the author's life and work in context.A volume in the series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington

An examination of why Afro-Bahian people are a marginalized racial group despite the fact that Bahia has a majority black population.

This comparative study of African and Hindu popular religions in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago charts the development of religion in the Caribbean by analysing the ways ecstatic forms of worship, enacted through trance performance and spirit mediumship, have adapted to capitalism and reconfigured themselves within the context of modernity.

Being Jewish in Brazil--the world's largest Catholic country--is fraught with paradoxes, and living in Sao Paulo only amplifies these vivid contradictions. The metropolis is home to Jews from over 60 countries of origin, and to the Hebraica, the world's largest Jewish athletic and social club. Jewish identity is rooted in layered experiences of historical and contemporary dispersal and border crossings. Brazil is famously tolerant of difference but less understanding of longings for elsewhere. Celebrating both Carnival and the High Holidays is but one example of how Jews in Sao Paulo hold themselves together as a community in the face of the forces of assimilation.Misha Klein's fascinating ethnography reveals the complex intertwining of Jewish and Brazilian life and identity.

In case studies that include the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume trace the establishment of Islam in the Americas over the past three centuries. They simultaneously explore Muslims' lived experiences and examine the ways Islam has been shaped in the "Muslim minority" societies in the New World.

In case studies that include the Caribbean, South America, Mexico, and the US, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume trace the establishment of Islam in the Americas over the past four centuries. They simultaneously explore Muslims' lived experiences and the ways Islam has been shaped in the New World.