Articles liés à Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Stories and Cuba

Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Stories and Cuba - Couverture souple

Livre 8 sur 43: Caribbean Studies

Miller, Ivor L.

 
9781617033193: Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Stories and Cuba
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 1617033197 ISBN 13 : 9781617033193
Editeur : University Press of Mississippi, 2012

Synopsis

In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role in the history of Cuba. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross River basin. Instead, each settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society called Ekpe, or "leopard," which was the highest indigenous authority. Ekpe lodges ruled local communities while also managing regional and long-distance trade. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to colonial Cuba, reorganized their Ekpe clubs covertly in Havana and Matanzas into a mutual-aid society called Abakua, which became foundational to Cuba's urban life and music.

Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ekpe initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakua initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership. Voice of the Leopard is an unprecedented tracing of an African title-society to its Caribbean incarnation, which has deeply influenced Cuba's creative energy and popular consciousness.

This book is sponsored by a grant from the InterAmericas(r)/Society of Arts and Letters of the Americas, a program of the Reed Foundation.

Les informations fournies dans la section « Synopsis » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

À propos de l'auteur

Engineer (Chief) Bassey E. Bassey of Nigeria is highly regarded in the Calabar community for his knowledge of the history and practice of the Ékpè system and is author of Ékpè Efik.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
University Press of Mississippi
Date d'édition
2012
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
1617033197
ISBN 13 
9781617033193
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
432
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
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