Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World |
Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World
Boydell & Brewer
July 2010
260 pages
12 black and white illustrations
9×6 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781580464734
Hardback ISBN: 9781580463263
eBook for Handhelds ISBN: 9781580468190
eBook ISBN: 9781580467056
Solimar Otero, Professor of Folklore
Indiana University, Bloomington
A study of the interchange between Cuba and Africa of Yoruban people and culture during the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the Aguda community.
Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World explores how Yoruba and Afro-Cuban communities moved across the Atlantic between the Americas and Africa in successive waves in the nineteenth century. In Havana, Yoruba slaves from Lagos banded together to buy their freedom and sail home to Nigeria. Once in Lagos, this Cuban repatriate community became known as the Aguda. This community built their own neighborhood that celebrated their Afrolatino heritage. For these Yoruba and Afro-Cuban diasporic populations, nostalgic constructions of family and community play the role of narrating and locating a longed-for home. By providing a link between the workings of nostalgia and the construction of home, this volume re-theorizes cultural imaginaries as a source for diasporic community reinvention. Through ethnographic fieldwork and research in folkloristics, Otero reveals that the Aguda identify strongly with their Afro-Cuban roots in contemporary times. Their fluid identity moves from Yoruba to Cuban, and back again, in a manner that illustrates the truly cyclical nature of transnational Atlantic community affiliation.
Table of Contents
- Grassroots Africans: Havana’s “Lagosians”
- Returning to Lagos: Making the Oja Home
- “Second Diasporas”: Reception in the Bight of Benin
- Situating Lagosian, Caribbean, and Latin American Diasporas
- Creating Afrocubanos: Public Cultures in a Circum-Atlantic Perspective
- Conclusion: Flow, Community, and Diaspora
- Appendix: Case Studies of Returnees to Lagos from Havana, Cuba