Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora

Archetypes of Transition

By: Paul Griffith

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Hardcover | 14 December 2016

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Hardcover
268 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
15.9 x 23.6 x 2.4

Hardcover

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Archetypes of Transition in Diaspora Art and Ritual examines residually oral conventions that shape the black diaspora imaginary in the Caribbean and America. Colonial humanist violations and inverse issues of black cultural and psychological affirmation are indexed in terms of a visionary gestalt according to which inner and outer realities unify creatively in natural and metaphysical orders. Paul Griffith's central focus is hermeneutical, examining the way in which religious and secular symbols inherent in rite and word as in vodun, limbo, the spirituals, puttin' on ole massa, and dramatic and narrative structures, for example, are made basic to the liberating post-colonial struggle. This evident interpenetration of political and religious visions looks back to death-rebirth traditions through which African groups made sense of the intervention of evil into social order. Herein, moreover, the explanatory, epistemic, and therapeutic structures of art and ritual share correspondences with the mythic archetypes that Carl Jung posits as a psychological inheritance of human beings universally.

Industry Reviews

Griffith's book offers readers testimony of his deep intellectual immersion in Caribbean, African American, and African oral and performative art forms, with persistent meditations on the central constitutive work of the word in informing the divine order and creating the human realm. The author's work here reminds us that the subject forms hold the power to endow matter and dailiness with the numinous and the magical, that there persists for all the ethical obligation to redeem the world from the chaos of hegemonic ideologies, to make the world comprehensible by creating a sustainable balance out of the "extreme antitheses" of matter and spirit. -- Keith Sandiford, Louisiana State University
Paul A. Griffith's groundbreaking monograph Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora: Archetypes of Transition, is as richly informed by such myth theorists as Jung, Campbell, Ricoeur, and Eliade as it is by Caribbean literature and ethnography; it expands on Kamau Brathwaite's tidalectics to examine its structuring principles and common symbolisms, not only as they appear in Brathwaite's poetry, but also in texts by such diverse writers as Ralph Ellison, Derek Walcott, and Toni Morrison, chronicling the process whereby the traumas of the Middle Passage are rearticulated and reshaped into "recognizable and livable cultural spheres." -- Michael Zeitler, Texas Southern University

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