Overview

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

Full Product Details

9781478000143

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Passages and Afterworlds embraces a range of religious traditions that includes Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and a variety of Afro-Caribbean syncretic faiths. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."" -- R. Berleant-Schiller * Choice * ""In Passages and Afterworlds, editors Yanique Hume and Maarit Forde have assembled a compelling set of essays on Caribbean deathways—mortuary ritual, memorialization, and the colonial and postcolonial management of beings alive and dead in the Greater Caribbean world. Across diverse contexts, the chapters do an excellent job of examining the ways in which communities use separations between those dead and alive to come closer together, making new life from death (including living well with the dead)."" -- Alexander Rocklin * Reading Religion * ""Passages and Afterworlds deftly examines death, dying, and afterworlds in the Caribbean region. Chapters—written in accessible language and in vivid detail—evidence a deep appreciation of the region's history, a history characterized by violent encounters and exploitation. This is an extraordinary book."" -- Stephen D. Glazier * Religion * “Passages and Afterworlds is a hugely important volume to the study of life and death in the circum-Caribbean.... This volume brings together groups from the Caribbean that are rarely placed in the same collection, which provides an innovative approach to Caribbean studies....” -- Alejandro Escalante * Anthropology Book Forum *

Passages and Afterworlds embraces a range of religious traditions that includes Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and a variety of Afro-Caribbean syncretic faiths. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- R. Berleant-Schiller * Choice *

Author Information

Maarit Forde is the Head of the Department of Literary, Cultural, and Communication Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and coeditor of Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, also published by Duke University Press. Yanique Hume is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, and coeditor of Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics, and Performance.

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