The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen

A personal and historical account of the particular place of death and funerals in African American life.

The construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion. Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little access to official services and wages, and received pay in both silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba. The Silver Women is thus a history of Black women’s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

Exploring the subject through many different theoretical frameworks and epistemological traditions, this book confronts the history of Haiti's three major practicing religious faiths: Vodou, Roman Catholicism, and Protestant Evangelicalism. Scholars, researchers, and faith practitioners have often depicted relations between these traditions as antagonistic, conflicting, unproductive, and lacking in mutual understanding. With the aim of exploring the possibility of nation building in Haiti and the benefits of interreligious collaboration, contributors to this book consider topics such as the obstacles to interfaith dialogue, religious conflict, interreligious dialogue in schools, race and identity, and religious pluralism. This book will be beneficial to scholars, practitioners, historians, and sociologists of religion, as well as the religious communities themselves in Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora.

In 2011 verscheen Een zwarte vrijstaat in Suriname; De Okaanse samenleving in de 18e eeuw. Het vertelt de geschiedenis van slaven die in de achttiende eeuw de plantages ontvluchtten om diep in het regenwoud, in het zuidoosten van Suriname, een nieuwe samenleving op te bouwen. Deze Marrons, zoals de ontsnapte slaven werden genoemd, sloten in 1760 een vredesverdrag met de planters. Zij noemden zich Okanisi. Hier, in dit tweede deel van deze historie, wordt verslag gedaan van de gebeurtenissen zoals die zich na 1800 afspeelden in de onafhankelijke gemeenschappen van Okaanse Marrons. Het is een bewogen geschiedenis van profetische bewegingen, heksenvervolgingen, en de opkomst van een eigen, inheemse, kerk. Al deze voor buitenstaanders exotische gebeurtenissen speelden zich af in een samenleving die hecht was geïntegreerd in het economische leven van de Guiana’s. In de twintigste eeuw vinden de eerste grote botsingen plaats tussen de Okanisi en het koloniale en postkoloniale bestuur van Suriname. Soms ging het om een staking die het economische leven van de kolonie dreigde te verlammen; later, eind jaren tachtig, toen Suriname onafhankelijk was, zorgde de opstand van enkele honderden Okaanse jongeren, en de gedoogsteun van de bevolking, voor een kritieke situatie in de jonge republiek. In deze eeuw zijn het voornamelijk conflicten over het behoud van het oude grondgebied, en zijn natuurlijke hulpbronnen, die de oude vrijstaat bedreigen. In Een zwarte vrijstaat in Suriname, deel 2, Van Wetering and Thoden van Velzen relate the history of the Okanisi after their successful escape into the South American rainforest and the signing of a peace treaty with Dutch planters in 1760. Following Part 1, which deals with their struggle for freedom, this volume describes the emergence of an autonomous Okanisi Maroon state; its integration into the economic life of the Guiana’s, but also its internal development, as it manifested itself through prophetic movements, anti-witchcraft purges and the rise of a native church. Predominantly based on oral sources, this book charts a previously undocumented history and provides a unique insight into a culture emerging from the roots of slavery.

How colonial categories of race and religion together created identities and hierarchies that today are vehicles for multicultural nationalism and social critique in the Caribbean and its diasporas. When the British Empire abolished slavery, Caribbean sugar plantation owners faced a labor shortage. To solve the problem, they imported indentured “coolie” laborers, Hindus and a minority Muslim population from the Indian subcontinent. Indentureship continued from 1838 until its official end in 1917. The Deepest Dye begins on post-emancipation plantations in the West Indies—where Europeans, Indians, and Africans intermingled for work and worship—and ranges to present-day England, North America, and Trinidad, where colonial-era legacies endure in identities and hierarchies that still shape the post-independence Caribbean and its contemporary diasporas. Aisha Khan focuses on the contested religious practices of obeah and Hosay, which are racialized as “African” and “Indian” despite the diversity of their participants. Obeah, a catch-all Caribbean term for sub-Saharan healing and divination traditions, was associated in colonial society with magic, slave insurrection, and fraud. This led to anti-obeah laws, some of which still remain in place. Hosay developed in the West Indies from Indian commemorations of the Islamic mourning ritual of Muharram. Although it received certain legal protections, Hosay’s mass gatherings, processions, and mock battles provoked fears of economic disruption and labor unrest that led to criminalization by colonial powers. The proper observance of Hosay was debated among some historical Muslim communities and continues to be debated now. In a nuanced study of these two practices, Aisha Khan sheds light on power dynamics through religious and racial identities formed in the context of colonialism in the Atlantic world, and shows how today these identities reiterate inequalities as well as reinforce demands for justice and recognition.