Afro-Cuban Religious Experience: Cultural Reflections in Narrative (Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series) - Softcover

Eugenio Matibag (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1947372602 ISBN 13: 9781947372603

Publisher: University Press of Florida, 2017

Synopsis

The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida’s long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary.

The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists’ sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike.

The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.

About this title

From the Author

On Rites and Writing: Afro-Cuban Religious Experience

African-based religion plays a prominent role in the Cuban imaginary and the Cuban national identity. In a series of interpretive readings of modern Cuban authors, this semiotic, postmodern and interdisciplinary study examines ways in which 20th-century literary texts reveal and make sense of Afro-Cuban belief systems. During the colonial period, the West and Central Africans who were transported to Cuba and forced into labor in effect reinvented their African religions. They did so by combining them with elements of the Catholic belief system, and so created a distinctive blending or syncretism of sacred signifying practices in semi-covert religions of their own fashioning. The culture of these religions offered to its believers a basis for a sense of collective identity and an avenue of psychic resistance to oppression.

Making reference to a broad range of texts that includes stories and myths as well as manuals and guidebooks on practice, this study surveys the cultural origins, rituals and doctrines of four major Afro-Cuban religious traditions--namely, those of Santeria (Regla de Ocha), Naniguismo (Regla Abakua), Palo Monte (Regla Conga), and Voudou (Regla Arara). The list of Afro-Cubanist authors examined here reads like a modern Who's Who of Cuban letters and includes such authors as Fernando Ortiz, Alejo Carpentier, Lydia Cabrera, Dora Alonso, G. Cabrera Infante, Miguel Barnet, Eugenio Hernandez Espinosa, and Manuel Cofino--all of them writers who have incorporated elements of Afro-Cuban religious sign-systems into the construction of their texts.

The analyses in this book also address both social perspectives on Afro-Cuban religion on the one hand and Afro-Cuban religion's own life-affirming and often subversive role in society on the other.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1947372602
• ISBN 13: 9781947372603
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300