Annotated Bibliography

Cludio Daflon

Looking at the Yoruba Diaspora as a study of both sides of the Atlantic and taking
into account the possibility of conceptualizing a Yoruba transatlantic nation, my
proposal is to study the development of Afro-American religions in Cuba and Brazil,
focusing on its connection to the Yoruba tradition, the process of creolization, and the
transnational perspectives explored by recent scholars of different spheres of knowledge.
Im particularly interested in the shifts in religions such as Candombl, Santera and
Umbanda, and the relation with the modernization discourses in those countries.

Books
Alonso, Miguel Che. The Development of Yoruba Candomble Communities in Salvador,
Bahia, 1835-1986. Palgrave Macmillian, 2014. (forthcoming)
It derives from the authors dissertation and it is an attempt to bring together the many
fragments of history concerning the Yoruba religious community and their rise to
prominence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth
centuries. It focuses mainly on the works of early Bahian ethnographers as primary
sources, while also incorporating newspaper accounts, police records, oral interviews,
and a variety of other innovative forms of evidence.
Brown, Diana DeG. Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil. Ann Arbor, Mich.:
UMI Research Press, 1986.
Brown explores the history and development of the syncretistic Brazilian religion of
Umbanda, from its beginnings in Rio de Janeiro during the 1920's to the late 1970s,
examining its changing spectrum of practices, followers, and beliefs. She demonstrates
how umbanda emerged during a period of rapid urban growth and how it has been
transformed from extreme marginality to legitimacy and social acceptance.
Clark, Mary Ann.
and Their Gender Implications. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida,
2005.
This study demonstrates how our ideas of religious beliefs and practices change in the
light of gender awareness. Exploring the philosophy and practices of the Orisha traditions
(principally the Afro-Cuban religious complex known as Santera) as they have
developed in the Americas, Clark suggests that, unlike many mainstream religions, these
traditions exist within a female-normative system in which all practitioners are expected
to take up female gender roles.

Clarke, Kamari Maxine.

Transnational Communities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Focus in the United States and Nigeria; it is an ethnographic study about a Yorb
revivalist community founded in 1970 in South Carolina and a theoretically sophisticated
exploration of how Yorb rs voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions
of transnational racial politics.
Falola, Toyin and Matt D. Childs, eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005.
A collection that aims to examine the legacy of the African diaspora focusing on the
Yoruba experience in Africa and the Americas, primarily during the seventeenth to
twentieth centuries. The chapters share some common ideas such as the importance of
study both sides of the Atlantic, the complexity of Yoruba ethnic classification and the
concept of a transatlantic nation.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
The author proposes scholars to move away from narrowly national or ethnically
exclusive frameworks. He argues that the development of black culture in the Americas
and Europe is a historical experience that can be called modern for a number of clear and
specific reasons.
Kraay, Hendrik. Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics: Bahia, 1790s to 1990s. Armonk,
N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.
This book is about the relationship of Afro-Bahia to Brazilian society. Kraay states that
one of the main objectives in the book is to demonstrate how Afro-Bahians struggled to
create a meaningful culture in an often hostile environment.
Lovejoy, Paul E. and David Trotman, eds. Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the
African Diaspora. London: Continuum, 2003.
This collection problematizes ethnicity and diaspora, exploring issues of identity,
experience, expectations, language of communications, religion, the role of homeland and
the image of homeland. There are several chapters addressing the construction or
reconstruction of ethnicity among groups identified as Nag and Mina in Brazil, who
elsewhere were to become known as Yoruba.
Matory, James Lorand.
. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2005.
This book conceptualizes Afro-Brazilian religion Candombl as simultaneously the
product and one of the greatest producers of a transoceanic culture and political economy
known as the Black Atlantic. Matory makes a case for the agency of African slaves and
their descendants in building and maintaining institutions based on what they understood
as African authenticity.

Murphy, Joseph M. and Mei-Mei Sanford, eds.

Goddess in Africa and the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2001.
The chapters explore Yoruba religion by documenting sun religion, which presents a
dynamic example of the resilience and renewed importance of traditional Yoruba images
in negotiating spiritual experience, social identity, and political power in contemporary
Africa and the African diaspora. There are specific chapters both on Cuba and Brazil
Otero, Solimar. Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and AfroAtlantic Diasporas. Albany: SUNY, 2013.
The authors in the volume look for connections between orisa religion, art and practice in
interdisciplinary and transnational ways. Their works are related to discourse and practice
of Yemoja traditions and their connections to national identity, gender, sexuality and
race.
Palmi, Stephan. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and
Tradition. Durham [N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.
The book focus on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, demonstrating that
traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that
produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations.
Palmi argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from
passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically
specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them.
Sandoval, Mercedes Cros. Worldview, the Orichas, and Santeria Africa to Cuba and
Beyond. Univ Press of Florida, 2009.
A recent synthesis of Santera. Sandoval explores how it emerged and developed in Cuba
out of transplanted Yoruba beliefs and continues to spread and adjust to changing times
and contexts. Sandoval examines how practitioners have adapted received beliefs and
practices to reconcile them with new environments, from plantation slavery to exile in the
United States.
Tishken, Joel E., Toyin Falola, and Akintunde Akinyemi, eds. Sng in Africa and the
African Diaspora (African Expressive Cultures). Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2009.
This is the third collection of essays on a major Yoruba orisa that Indiana University
Press has produced over recent years. Like its predecessors on Ogun (1989, revised
edition 1997) and Osun (2001), it covers both Africa and the New World, and is
interdisciplinary, ranging from history and anthropology to literary and cultural studies.
One of the important contributions of the collection is to show that contrary to what is
several times stated in this book, Sango was not a pan-Yoruba deity. Rather, up to the late
nineteenth century he was regarded as alien and intrusive over a large swathe of eastern
Yorubaland.

Articles
Cole, George. "Transcultureo cubano: la santera, el negrismo y la definicin de la
identidad cultural cubana a comienzos del siglo XX." Dissidences 3, no. 5 (2012):
5.
Investigates the idea of afrocubanidad in Cuban literature and its connections to religious
practices related to Santera.
Engler, Steven, Umbanda and Africa, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and
Emergent Religions, Vol.15, No.4 (May 2012), 301-322.
It argues that scholarship on Umbanda (a Brazilian hybrid of Candomble, Kardecist
Spiritism, and popular Catholicism, with romanticized indigenous elements) manifests
certain limitations that lead insufficient emphasis on the religious traditions internal
doctrinal, ritual, and organizational variation. It compares the complex and ambivalent
place of African traditions in Umbanda and Candomble, highlightning the extent to
which Umbanda has seen as derivative, more distant from Africa.
Frigerio, Alejandro. Umbanda and Batuque in the Southern Cone: Transnationalization
as Cross-Border Religious Flow and as Social Field. IN Cristina Rocha and
Manuel A. Vasquez, The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, Brill, 2013, 165-195.
This chapter describes the growth of umbanda in Argentina, analyzing it within a
transnational frame of reference. The chapter discusses the growth of Afro-Brazilian
religions in the Southern Cone as an example of transnationalization from below, one that
is not primarily caused by immigration, since these religions were not taken to Argentina
or Uruguay by Brazilian migrants.
Olmos, Lioba Rossbach de. Los orishas con sus espacios y los espacios de los orishas:
Acerca de la relocalizacin de la santera en nuevos entornos. Batey, Vol.1, No1
(2010).
About the transplantation of santera to other spaces and the idea of re-territorialization.
It can help me in parallels with the transplantation of umbanda from Brazil to South
American countries.
Wirtz, Kristina. Santeria in Cuban national consciousness: a religious case of the doble
moral. Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 9 No.2 (2004): 409-438.
A essay the development of Santera in contemporary Cuba as a result of a pluriconceptual interaction; as a sacred practice, a type of folklore, and a superstition. The
author develops the notion of meta-culture, or the idea that those interpretations of
Santera are related to distinct concepts of cubanidad.