Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume II, Orisa, Stewart scrutinizes the West African heritage and religious imagination of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and explores their meaning-making traditions in the wake of slavery and colonialism. She investigates the pivotal periods of nineteenth-century liberated African resettlement, the twentieth-century Black Power movement, and subsequent campaigns for the civil right to religious freedom in Trinidad. Disrupting syncretism frameworks, Stewart probes the salience of Africa as a religious symbol and the prominence of Africana nations and religious nationalisms in projects of black belonging and identity formation, including those of Orisa mothers. Contributing to global womanist thought and activism, Yoruba-Orisa spiritual mothers disclose the fullness of the black religious imagination’s affective, hermeneutic, and political capacities.

Dianne M. Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University and author of Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience and Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage.

List of Abbreviations Used in Text  ix
Note on Orthography and Terminology  xi
Preface  xiii
Acknowledgments  xix
Introduction to Volume II  1
1. I Believe He Is a Yaraba, a Tribe of Africans Here: Establishing a Yoruba-Orisa Nation in Trinidad  9
2. I Had a Family That Belonged to All Kinds of Things: Yoruba-Orisa Kinship Principles and the Poetics of Social Prestige  52
3. “We Smashed Those Statues or Painted Them Black”: Orisa Traditions and Africana Religious Nationalism since the Era of Black Power  83
4. You Had the Respected Mothers Who Had Power! Motherness, Heritage Love, and Womanist Anagrammars of Care in the Yoruba-Orisa Tradition  147
5. The African Gods Are from Tribes and Nations: An Africana Approach to Religious Studies in the Black Diaspora  221
Afterword. Orisa Vigoyana from Guyana  249
List of Abbreviations Use in Notes  255
Notes  257
Bibliography  305
Index  327