The Yoruba Are on a Rock focuses on the Africans who arrived in Grenada decades after the abolition of the British slave trade and how they radically shaped the religious and cultural landscape of the island. Rooted in extensive archival and ethnographic research, Shantel A. George carefully traces and unpacks the complex movements of people and ideas between various points in western Africa and the Eastern Caribbean to argue that Orisa worship in Grenada is not, as has been generally supposed, a residue of recaptive Yoruba peoples, but emerged from dynamic and multi-layered exchanges within and beyond Grenada. Further, the book shows how recaptives pursued freedom by drawing on shared African histories and experiences in the homeland and in Grenada, and recovers intriguing individual biographies of the recaptives, their descendants, and religious custodians. By historicising this island's little-known and fascinating tradition, the book advances our knowledge of African diaspora cultures and histories.
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'Shantel George's landmark study affirms the power of her historically grounded transdisciplinary approach by integrating close study of the archival record with a sensitivity to ongoing reclamations of African-derived religions as central to the complex multicultural spiritual lives of African descendants in Grenada.' Ras Michael Lawrence Brown, Georgia State University and author of African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry 'George illuminates the little-known cultural impact of the 52,000 Africans rescued from slave ships and resettled in the British Caribbean. In the eastern Caribbean, these 'recaptives' from the Bight of Benin crafted religions called 'Shango' and 'African Work,' whose charismatic Yoruba-identified leaders incorporated elements of Roman Catholicism, Seventh-Day Adventism, European magic, Hinduism, and multiple western African religions. No student of the wider Black Atlantic should overlook this important 'infra-Atlantic' case.' J. Lorand Matory, Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Collection, Duke University 'In this brilliant work of scholarly innovation, Shantel George takes a local interdisciplinary study of the religious cultures of liberated Africans and their Grenadian descendants to a regional Caribbean and global Atlantic world scale, illuminating Afro-Grenadians' prominence in the religious formation and political consciousness of the wider African diaspora. Her painstaking archival and ethnographic research unequivocally establishes her as a leading authority on the transatlantic history of liberated Africans whose destination was the Anglophone Caribbean.' Dianne M. Stewart, Emory University and author of Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination
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ISBN-13
978-1-009-35896-5 (9781009358965)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Shantel A. George is Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on African-derived cultures and identities in the British Caribbean and the global circulation of African commodities. This is her first book.
Autor*in
University of Glasgow
List of figures; Introduction; 1. 'Old Creoles': the foundation of Grenada's plantation society; 2. 'Scenes of former slavery': abolitionism and the persistence of unfree labour; 3. New nations: the origins and identities of recaptives; 4. Bonds of survival: from 'liberation' to unfreedom; 5. 'Acquaintances and countrymen': building recaptive African communities; 6. 'Joining their countrymen and women': recaptive Africans after indentureship; 7. 'They call them the Yarriba people, it was African dance': becoming Yoruba, becoming African; 8. Three nights: curating African, African grenadian, and Indian spaces; 9. 'In the form of the baptists': Norman Paul and the legacies of the spiritual baptists; 10. Grenada ain't far from Africa': historical memories, human flight, and the recovery of African biographies; Epilogue; Appendix; Bibliography.
