Books in the The Black Atlantic Cultural Series: Revisioning Artistic, Historical, Literary, Psychological, and Sociological Perspectives series

Recovering the African Feminine Divine in Literature, the Arts, and Practice: Yemonja Awakening provides context to the myriad ways in which the African feminine divine is being reclaimed by scholars, practitioners, and cultural scholars worldwide. This volume addresses the complex ways in which the reclamation of and recognition of Yemonja, the African female deity who is the mother of the entire world of the Orisha, facilitates cultural survival and the formation of African-centric identity. Also known as Yemaya, Iemanya and Yemaya-Olokun, Yemonja is the deity whose province is the ocean and, given that the Middle Passage was the cultural and spatial crossroad to AfricaΓÇÖs numerous diasporas, this deity links the shared histories of African and African descent cultural praxis worldwide. This work provides the context for understanding how the spiritual conceptualizations of the African feminine divine underpin critical cultural forms, even when it has been previously unacknowledged and despite the cultural encounters with European and Western models of being. Scholars of African diaspora studies and the arts will find this book particularly interesting.

Archetypes of Transition in Diaspora Art and Ritual examines residually oral conventions that shape the black diaspora imaginary in the Caribbean and America. Colonial humanist violations and inverse issues of black cultural and psychological affirmation are indexed in terms of a visionary gestalt according to which inner and outer realities unify creatively in natural and metaphysical orders. Paul Griffith's central focus is hermeneutical, examining the way in which religious and secular symbols inherent in rite and word as in vodun, limbo, the spirituals, puttin' on ole massa, and dramatic and narrative structures, for example, are made basic to the liberating post-colonial struggle. This evident interpenetration of political and religious visions looks back to death-rebirth traditions through which African groups made sense of the intervention of evil into social order. Herein, moreover, the explanatory, epistemic, and therapeutic structures of art and ritual share correspondences with the mythic archetypes that Carl Jung posits as a psychological inheritance of human beings universally.