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The Power of Our Archive

Submitted to Program Units
1: African Diaspora Religions Unit

“I urge States to take concrete steps, with the full participation of people of African descent and their communities, to tackle old and new forms of racial discrimination; and to dismantle entrenched structural and institutional racism." --- UN Secretary-General António Guterres

The year 2024 marks the close of the United Nation’s decades-long proclamation to celebrate people of  African descent as representatives of a distinct group whose human rights must be promoted and protected.  2024 also heralds the 150th anniversary of Afro-Puerto Rican, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, whose collection of Black literature, enslaved peoples’ narratives, artwork, artifacts, and diasporic materials has become foremost in the study of Black life. Finally, Lydia Cabrera’s iconic work, El Monte: Notes on the Religions, Magic, and Folklore of the Black and Creole People of Cuba will turn 70, in 2024; and the first English translation is now available.

Throughout African Diaspora history there have been archives, inviting deep exploration into the unknown, the obscured, and the known. Sometimes hidden in plain sight, including Obeah oaths in the narrative of Tacky’s Rebellion and Jamaica’s Baptist War; juridical, birth, and death records compared against oral histories, historical art, and illustration of colonial encounters that include but are not limited to narratives of race, ethnicity, gender, class, dis/ability, sexuality/ies under an array of micro and macro violent technologies (fear, shame, physical, psychological and psychosocial abuse); and the Colored Conventions Project (1830) or the Early Caribbean Digital Archives (2011).

This panel seeks to explore the idea, presence, and importance of archives among us when all too often our archives were oral and aural, normatively shaped, vanished, or erased.

Scott Barton, University of Notre Dame, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Throughout African Diaspora history there have been archives, inviting deep exploration into the unknown, the obscured, and the known. Sometimes hidden in plain sight, including Obeah oaths in the narrative of Tacky’s Rebellion and Jamaica’s Baptist War; juridical, birth, and death records compared against oral histories, historical art, and illustration of colonial encounters that include but are not limited to narratives of race, ethnicity, gender, class, dis/ability, sexuality/ies under an array of micro and macro violent technologies (fear, shame, physical, psychological and psychosocial abuse); and the Colored Conventions Project (1830) or the Early Caribbean Digital Archives (2011).

This panel seeks to explore the idea, presence, and importance of archives among us when all too often our archives were oral and aural, normatively shaped, vanished, or erased.

Papers

  • Andrew Barnes,

    Ethiopianism as a Trans-Atlantic Christian Religious Movement

    Abstract

    The paper talks about Ethiopianism as the first recognizable religious movement among Protestant Christians of African descent. Significantly, it was a religious movement which emphasize the idea of social ameliration/racial uplift.  The paper will make the case that Ethiopianism originated among free black Christians who were conscious of the ways in which racism among white Christians limited the spread of the ideas and ideals of liberal Christianity among peoples of color.  For these Christians, releasing liberal Christianity, and its social ameliorative properties from the fetters of white racism became an evangelical goal, with the understanding that there was an onus upon them, as Ethiopianists, to pursue this goal among peoples of African descent. The concern of the paper is with how Ethiopianism grew from its 18th century North Atlantic origins to become the impetus behind African initiated Christian reform movements in the 20th century Atlantic world.

  • Sally Hansen, University of Notre Dame

    Trans*Atlantic Archives: Singing the Dead in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Sangoma Poetics

    Abstract

    In her 2008 experimental poetry collection, Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip untells the “story that cannot be told” of the Middle Passage Zong Massacre, in which over one hundred fifty Africans were thrown overboard to ensure insurance compensation for the ship owners. Philip uses the single archival trace of the massacre, the Gregson vs. Gilbert court case, to assault the language and logic that render Black bodies consumable. Murdering words and their false sense, Philip describes herself  as a “sangoma,” or a Zulu physical and spiritual healer. She thus reclaims African diasporic ritual practice, opening to an ancestral voice, Setaey Adamu Boateng, who speaks the stammers of the dead through her onto the page. I connect Philip’s sangoma poetics to what Christina Sharpe calls “Trans*Atlantic” Blackness, a mode of living in the afterlives of slavery in which risk and disruptive possibility inhere in the surplus meanings of Black flesh.

  • Sierra Lawson, UNC Chapel Hill

    Beyond Textual Literacies: Envisioning Religion through Afro-Peruvian Archives

    Abstract

    This paper examines both the writings of Ursula de Jesus, (1604-1666), a Black woman born into slavery who lived in the Santa Clara convent (of the order of the Poor Clares) in Lima with her ama (owner) for 28 years as one of hundreds of slaves, as well as the visual literacies she demonstrates through written accounts. Ursula’s freedom was purchased by a nun in 1645, and Ursula became a free religious servant called a donada. I argue her writings and the visual literacies they draw on reveal how multiple paradigms of blood were actively circulating in relation to colonial Peruvian understandings of religion. Blood was at once redemptive in a Christian understanding and potentially limiting when understood through racialized colonial frameworks that associate one’s ‘character’ with their bodily composition through fluids like blood.

Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Play Audio from Laptop Computer
Podium microphone

Sabbath Observance

Sunday morning

Comments

As co-chair of the African Diaspora Religions Unit along with Carol Marie Webster, our unit has made an executive decision to accept your proposal and restructure our call, to eliminate co-sponsorship between other units. This will allow our unit to accept the four top papers as a panel in conversation with one another. In the next few weeks, we will be in touch to answer any questions you may have.

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

90 Minutes

Schedule Preference

Saturday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Schedule Preference Other

Sunday, 3:00 - 4:30 PM

Tags

#Black Atlantic Religions
#poetry
#queer
#affect #emotion #embodiment
# ritual studies