Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora

Reviews / Votes

Griffith's book offers readers testimony of his deep intellectual immersion in Caribbean, African American, and African oral and performative art forms, with persistent meditations on the central constitutive work of the word in informing the divine order and creating the human realm. The author's work here reminds us that the subject forms hold the power to endow matter and dailiness with the numinous and the magical, that there persists for all the ethical obligation to redeem the world from the chaos of hegemonic ideologies, to make the world comprehensible by creating a sustainable balance out of the "extreme antitheses" of matter and spirit. -- Keith Sandiford, Louisiana State University Paul A. Griffith's groundbreaking monograph Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora: Archetypes of Transition, is as richly informed by such myth theorists as Jung, Campbell, Ricoeur, and Eliade as it is by Caribbean literature and ethnography; it expands on Kamau Brathwaite's tidalectics to examine its structuring principles and common symbolisms, not only as they appear in Brathwaite's poetry, but also in texts by such diverse writers as Ralph Ellison, Derek Walcott, and Toni Morrison, chronicling the process whereby the traumas of the Middle Passage are rearticulated and reshaped into "recognizable and livable cultural spheres." -- Michael Zeitler, Texas Southern University