Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions

The anthropology and history of African American religious formations has long been dominated by approaches aiming to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic continuities linking such traditions to identifiable African source cultures. While not denying such continuities, the contributors to this volume seek to transcend this research agenda by bracketing Africa and African pasts as objective givens, and asking instead what role notions of Africanity and pastfulness play in the social and ritual lives of historical and contemporary practitioners of Afro-Atlantic religious formations. The volume’s goal is to open up contextually salient claims to African origins to empirical scrutiny, and so contribute to a broadening of the terms of debate in Afro-Atlantic studies.