Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of Òyótúnjí African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yorùbá Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, Òyótúnjí is a Yorùbá revivalist community founded in 1970.
Mapping Yorùbá Networks is an innovative ethnography of Òyótúnjí and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yorùbá òrìsà voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. Drawing on several years of multisited fieldwork in the United States and Nigeria, Kamari Maxine Clarke describes Òyótúnjí in vivid detail—the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices—and explores how ideas of what constitutes the Yorùbá past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary Yorùbá transatlantic religious networks and the post-1970s institutionalization of roots heritage in American social life.
Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of &Ogra
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Introduction: From Village, to Nation, toTransnational Networks
Part One. vertical formations of institutions
1 ‘‘On Far Away Shores, Home Is Not Far’’: Mapping Formations of Place, Race, and Nation
2 ‘‘White Man Say They Are African’’: Roots Tourism and the Industry of Race as Culture
Part Two. the making of transnational networks
3 Micropower and Oyo Hegemony in Yorùbá Transnational Revivalism
4 ‘‘ManyWere Taken, but SomeWere Sent’’: The Remembering and Forgetting of Yorùbá Group Membership
5 Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimation of Yorùbá Ancestral Roots
6 Recasting Gender: Family, Status, and Legal Institutionalism
Epilogue: Multisited Ethnographies in an Age of Globalization