Africas of the Americas: Beyond Search for Origins in Study Afro Atlantic Religions

Until recently, African Americanist scholarship has been dominated by programmatic searches for African origins. This book aims to transcend this research agenda by exploring the ritual and discursive production and reproduction of conceptions of Africa and Africanity in the Americas. The anthropology and history of African American religious formations has long been dominated by approaches aiming to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic continuities linking such traditions to identifiable African source cultures. While not denying such continuities, the contributors to this volume seek to transcend this research agenda by bracketing "Africa" and "African pasts" as objective givens, and asking instead what role notions of "Africanity" and "pastfulness" play in the social and ritual lives of historical and contemporary practitioners of Afro-Atlantic religious formations. The volume’s goal is to open up contextually salient claims to "African origins" to empirical scrutiny, and so contribute to a broadening of the terms of debate in Afro-Atlantic studies.