The papers in this panel explore a comparative analysis of Chrisitian ideas on African Ancestral Traditions and Chinese Religions, Black being in the contexts of Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and Africana religions, and the meanings of burial rites in the Ivory Coast.
This paper critically evaluates ways in which ancestor traditions (what Paulin Batairwa Kubuya calls “ancestor religion”) have been interpreted in both Chinese and African settings. The aim is not to recover notions of an a priori universalism for comparative inquiry into two traditions as polyvalent as Chinese and African ancestral traditions, which are diverse in each case, but, by exploring patterns of “Christian conversations” on these traditions (fraught, controversial, or constructive - ranging from the political, to the proselytizing, to the intimate, to the conciliatory, and the theologically constructive) found in historical ethnography (including empirical findings), to critique how Christian ethnography has pronounced upon the ancestral rite across cultures. The comparative reconstruction of this conversation conceives of ethnography as a joint negotiation among insider-informants and non-insiders acting as cultural translators and interpreters, albeit with their own agendas, rather than the imposed interpretations of the cultural outsider alone.
The paper explores the intersections of Haitian Vodou and structured injustice against black bodies and communities in the USA. Haitian migrants in Miami-Florida who practice Vodou live in two parallel worlds as far as questions of criminality and justice are concerned—one world is informed by Vodou discourse and the other by the culture of the American legal and criminal justice systems with the institutions designed to enforce them. The research considers ways ritual agents, especially, Mambos deploy models in Haitian Vodou in contesting ‘blackness’ in the USA —an effect of the structural injustice and violence of black bodies and communities.
The research involves fieldwork among members of the Vodou Holistic Center in South Florida, living in Pembroke Pines and Little Haiti. These religious agents perform their religions under imperial duress whereby the hegemonies under which they live as migrants criminalize their bodies and practices, even describing some as criminal.
This paper explores how farmers in the village of Bakayo maintain peace and solidarity with their migrant neighbors through mutual funeral participation in Post-conflict Cote d’Ivoire. Violent conflict struck Côte d’Ivoire from 2002 to 2011, charged by nationalist discourse and xenophobia against immigrants. This paper takes us to the village of Bakayo, home of Bété-speakers. Beginning in the 1960s, the Bété-speakers gave uncultivated land to immigrants from Burkina Faso, namely Mossi, through a system of land-sharing known as “tutorat.” One of the main stipulations of this system is that the Mossi must help Bété with their expensive and elaborate funerals. Based on my fieldwork in Cote d’Ivoire from 2022-2023, I argue that the inter-ethnic participation found at funerals in Bakayo provides us all a new means of looking at peace and conflict, as the people of Bakayo build peace their own way, finding reconciliation through death in Post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire.
In this paper, I explore the relationship between Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and Africana religion. I maintain that while Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and Africana religion arise from similar ontogenic, sociogenic, and egogenic impulses, there has been a lack of engagement across their literary and theoretical domains. Such a state of affairs has meant a missed opportunity to imagine innovative and potentially liberative ontologies.