Sacred Africana, Aquatic: Exploring Abundance and Scarcity Through Ritual in Burkina Faso, Cuba, and Haiti

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

Water informs religious and spiritual worldsenses the globe over; commonplace rituals from baptism to libation underwrite its prescience. The religious cultures of West and Central Africa, along with their multiple diasporas, theorize, encounter, and engage water centrally. Panel participants will dive deeply into the water-based epistemologies of three Africana communities – in Burkina Faso, Cuba, and Haiti – probing liturgical language, ritual performance and spiritual entities for aquatic common threads. What unites this panel is an attention to cosmological imagination: utilizing sacred stories and performance as a constructive site for African Atlantic religious theorization. Panel participants will analyze the historical realities that have made water such a contested yet indispensable feature of Africana religious life.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Maya Berry

Individual Presentations

• Staging Ochún: To Demand Compensation with a Smile - Maya Berry

• Mami Wata, Chief Meteorologist: A Comparative Africana Approach to Rain and Groundwater in Rural Burkina Faso - Meredith Coleman-Tobias, Mount Holyoke College

• Going anba dlo: A Scholar’s Response to a Mother’s Love and Lament - Christina Désert

• Response - Rachel E. Harding, University of Colorado Denver