Shackled Sentiments

The ramifications of the trans-Saharan, trans-Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and domestic African slave trades are immeasurable, and they continue to disaffect black people from Africa to Haiti and Los Angeles to Lagos. Shackled Sentiments focuses on the memories and embodiments of slavery through case studies from western, eastern, and central Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The contributors to this collection examine the ways that memories of slavery have been internalized. Slavery and memory are assessed from multiple perspectives: as sets of ritual practices, community-based systems of spirit veneration, mechanisms of resistance and national pride, sacred languages informing personhood, and instruments for healing and well-being. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, history, religion, art, and linguistics.

Chapter 1: American Women Anthropologists of the 20th Century on Haitian Vodou: A Brief Review

Natacha Giafferi-Dombre

Chapter 2: Vodou as the Embryo and Marker of Haitian Socio-Historical Identity

Nixon Cleophat

Chapter 3: Remembering Our Mothers: Black Women, Slavery, and Maternal Power in Barbados and Jamaica

Maureen Elgersman Lee

Chapter 4: The Past is Present: Slavery, Personhood, and Mimesis in Ewe Gorovodu and Mama Tchamba (Togo)

Eric Montgomery

Chapter 5: Slavery, Possession and Witchcraft in the Sudan: The Journey of the Zar Tumbura Cult

Gerasimos Makris

Chapter 6: Living with the Ghosts of Slavery in Western Eweland: Taming Ancestral Energies and Creating Ritual Cultures

Meera Venkatachalam

Chapter 7: Possession, Power, and Slavery in Eastern Africa

Beatrice Nicolini

Chapter 8: Slavery and Its Discontents: Shackled History as Spiritual Resources in Jamaica

Christian Vannier

Chapter 9: The Language of the Slave Spirits in Brazil

Laura Alvarez Lopez