Table of Contents

Note on Orthography ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxix
Introduction: From Village, to Nation, to Transnational Networks 1
PART ONE. VERTICAL FORMATIONS OF INSTITUTIONS
1 “On Far Away Shores, Home Is Not Far”: Mapping Formations of Place, Race, and Nation 51
2 “White Man Say They Are African”: Roots Tourism and the Industry of Race as Culture 107
PART TWO. THE MAKING OF TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS
3 Micropower and Oyo Hegemony in Yoruba Transnational Revivalism 157
4 “Many Were Taken, but Some Were Sent”: The Remembering and Forgetting of Yoruba Group Membership 201
5 Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimation of Yoruba Ancestral Roots 231
6 Recasting Gender: Family, Status, and Legal Institutionalism 257
Epilogue: Multisited Ethnographies in an Age of Globalization 279
Appendix 289
Notes 295
Glossary 317
Bibliography 323
Index 341

Promotional Information

Ethnographic study of life and ritual in an African American Yoruba revivalist community and its complex relation to Nigerian Yoruba identity

About the Author

Kamari Maxine Clarke is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University.

Reviews

Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of oyotunji African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yoruba Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty- "In her pioneering analysis of the formation of a new religious nationalist movement, Kamari Maxine Clarke shows in fascinating detail how the oyotunji community refashioned Yoruba religion to suit its notion of racial identity."--Jacob Olupona, editor of African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions "In this highly original analysis, Kamari Maxine Clarke shows how the apparent stability of 'tradition' at different moments in time has been the product of processes of innovation made both necessary and possible during particular phases of economic limitation and religious and political oppression in the long historical stream of 'black transatlantic' cultural production."--Brackette F. Williams, author of Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle " ... an impressive account of Oyotunji and the role of religious practices and memory of the past in creating a transnational community. Clarke has succeeded in creating a narrative in which the cultural politics of blackness has merged with the notion of citizenship and the quest to resolve the dilemma of globalisation and its cultural implications."--Jrnl of Contemporary Religion, October 2006