Genealogies of reclaimed nobility: The geotemporality of Yoruba belonging.
详细信息
- 作者：Clarke ; Maxine Kamari.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：1997
- 毕业院校：University of California
- ISBN：9780591622300
- CBH：9811522
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：17941053
- Pages：385
文摘
The data for this dissertation were collected in two sites between February 1995 and May 1996. The predominant research site was a Yoruba community in Beaufort,South Carolina named b Oyotunji African Village. b Oyotunji a Yoruba word meaning "Oyo returns," refers to what the residents identify as their ancestral town of Oyo in the ancient Oyo Empire of Yorubaland. Oyotunji Village is a twenty-seven-year-old community of what I classify as African American converts to Yoruba religious practices. During my fifteen-month study,I also traveled with a small entourage from Oyotunji Village to many sites in the US and Nigeria,including the second principal locus of this dissertation,the city of Oyo. In these sites,I studied the Oyotunji Village practitioners construction and contestations of "traditional" Yoruba practices. This dissertation is an analysis of the Oyotunji Village practitioners social processes of re-inventing Yoruba "traditions." As part of a black American revitalization movement,these practitioners recreate and narrativize their identities through the adoption of post-trans-Atlantic slavery genealogies,hierarchies of Yoruba kingships and nobility,and gender codes seen as being "traditionally" Yoruba. I examine the ways that Yoruba "tradition" is enacted by those claiming Yoruba "traditionalist" identities,but whose ability to naturalize their identity is mediated by nationalist discourses surrounding Nigerian Yoruba criteria for "becoming" Yoruba and "truly" "belonging" to a pantheon of national and international nobility. Ultimately,by examining the processes of Yoruba reclamation in Oyotunji African Village,I chart the signs of Yoruba "traditionalism" that have come to privilege Yoruba "belonging" in Oyo,Nigeria. I illustrate that identity,as an ongoing process of reformulation and contestation,is manipulatable according to spatial and temporal processes which involve the geotemporal detachment of place and the reversibility of time in transnational webs of power. I understand geotemporality as a process of transnational identity negotiation active throughout the African diaspora. This theory emanates from attempts to analyze transnational relations between groups who see themselves as one race. I conclude that both US American and Oyo "traditionalists" were,indeed,mutually engaged in the process of redefining and recreating definitions of "traditionalism" through public events and everyday activities. However,the shaping of traditional practices and the narrativizing of African-based genealogies illustrate that even as colonial histories and categories were appropriated in an effort to reclaim Yoruba identities,dominant US narratives of Yoruba culture were "invented" and used as redemptive strategies,reformulated as surviving temporal and spatial genealogies among those in the Black Atlantic.