Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities

Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of y t nj African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yor b Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, y t nj is a Yor b revivalist community founded in 1970. Mapping Yor b Networks is an innovative ethnography of y t nj and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yor b r s voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. Drawing on several years of multisited fieldwork in the United States and Nigeria, Kamari Maxine Clarke describes y t nj in vivid detail--the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices--and explores how ideas of what constitutes the Yor b past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary Yor b transatlantic religious networks and the post-1970s institutionalization of roots heritage in American social life.

Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of y t nj Village's religious and tourist economy. She discusses how the community generates income through the sale of prophetic divinatory consultations, African market souvenirs--such as cloth, books, candles, and carvings--and fees for community-based tours and dining services. Clarke accompanied y t nj villagers to Nigeria, and she describes how these heritage travelers often returned home feeling that despite the separation of their ancestors from Africa as a result of transatlantic slavery, they--more than the Nigerian Yor b --are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great y Empire of the Yor b people. Mapping Yor b Networks is a unique look at the political economy of homeland identification and the transnational construction and legitimization of ideas such as authenticity, ancestry, blackness, and tradition.

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Clarke, Kamari Maxine
Published: 07/12/2004
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333425
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.17lbs
Size: 9.10h x 5.98w x 0.90d