Of Note
Award Winner
- Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a “survival,” or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world.
Vividly combining history and ethnography, Matory spotlights a so-called folk religion defined not by its closure or internal homogeneity but by the diversity of its connections to classes and places often far away. This book sets a new standard for the study of transnationalism in its subaltern and often ancient manifestations.
J. Lorand Matory's book was the winner of the 2006 Melville J. Herskovits Award, African Studies Association (Princeton University Press, 2005). He is a faculty associate of the Weatherhead Center and a professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.