In Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, Solimar Otero presents a rich analysis of the diasporic community of Afrolatinos that circulated between Nigeria and Cuba in the nineteenth century, the flexible and portable set of cultural identities and social structures that they developed in response to the challenges of slavery and colonialism, and the lasting impact that they had on both Cuban and Nigerian culture and society in the process. More specifically, she argues that the open and inclusive processes of culture- and community-building characteristic of Nigeria’s Yoruba people--who traditionally deal with difference by performatively incorporating other ethnic groups into their religious cosmologies, fictive genealogies, and civic organizations--helped Yoruba slaves and their descendants survive both when they were first brought to the Atlantic and when they later repatriated to Africa, and furthermore that these processes became a fundamental part of the Latin American and Caribbean sociocultural fabric. For Otero, in other words, the creolization and syncretism so commonly associated with Latin American and Caribbean cultures are actually based on distinctly African--and especially Yoruba--approaches to constructing identity, community, and folk history. She claims, moreover, that it is only by tracing how these practices have been used dynamically and strategically as members of this transnational population have traversed the Atlantic in both directions--rather than just during their initial outward dispersion, as most scholars tend to do--that we can fully understand their mechanics and legacies. To this end, she offers a nuanced historical, theoretical, and ethnographic comparison of the experiences of and relationships between Lagosian Afro-Cubans in Lagos and Havana alike from the nineteenth century up to the present.
After introducing her argument and situating it within the larger literature in the introduction, Otero conducts a detailed historical investigation of the lives and experiences of Lagosian communities in nineteenth-century Havana in chapter 1. She explores the ambiguous legal status of slaves and ex-slaves during this period, and illustrates the ways in which Lagosians strategically manipulated that ambiguity and the institutions of slavery themselves to subvert the system and/or prosper financially. She also analyzes several oral histories of freed Lagosian repatriates collected in the nineteenth century, in order to provide a more emic account of the various forms of prosperity and agency which were attainable under slavery.
Chapter 2 shifts the focus from Havana to Lagos, as Otero conducts a historical analysis of the society that the diasporic Lagosian Afro-Cubans left and later returned to. She claims, for instance, that Lagos was always an important center of trade, and thus of constant contact and exchange between a heterogeneous group of cultures and ethnicities. As a result, residents learned to establish connections across various sociocultural divides, often through performative incorporations of new groups into religious pantheons, folk histories, and pliable constructs of collective social identity. Otero continues that it was this very sensibility that allowed enslaved Lagosians in Cuba to survive and prosper as they did, and also that allowed Afro-Cuban repatriates to reintegrate into Lagosian society despite the significant cultural differences--in terms of economic skills, Catholicism-tinged religious sensibilities, and transatlantic histories and identities--that distinguished them from those who had never left.
In Chapter 3, Otero delves deeper into the fundamental role that religion--in particular, traditional Yoruba orisha worship--played in this process of repatriation and reintegration. She argues that the Yoruba are a heterogeneous people with diverse religious systems, but that orisha worship serves as the social glue which has held them all together even when they practice it differently. Returning Afro-Cubans fit nicely into this structure, as their belief in the orishas made them recognizable to local Lagosians even as their idiosyncratic way of practicing it--via syncretic Afro-Cuban religions like Santería, which fused Yoruba traditions with folk Catholicism--made them distinct. Otero also emphasizes the centrality of orisha worship to the pliable identities and communities of the repatriates themselves both while in Havana and after they returned to Lagos, as religious civic associations in each context helped them maintain links to their old “homes” and establish themselves in their new ones.
In chapter 4, Otero shifts to a more ethnographic perspective in order to explore the ways in which repatriated Afro-Cubans transformed the spaces around them when they returned to Lagos, as well as the ways in which their living descendants imagine their own family histories, cultural identities, and connections both to Cuba and to their fellow Lagosians. She argues that identity for these individuals is flexible and strategic, with multiple layers that serve different functions. Identifications with the Yoruba nation and with other groups of repatriates allow them to integrate into the broader Lagosian society, while identifications with Cuba allow them to represent themselves as unique members of that society. This, in turn, was exactly how enslaved Lagosians identified themselves and their communities in Havana; the only difference was which place was the old “home” and which place was the new one. In both cases, however, performance in various registers--religious ritual, narration or inscription of family history, intermarriage with other repatriate groups, etc.--has been central to this process.
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[Review length: 1381 words • Review posted on March 19, 2012]