Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities

Abstract

Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in Making of Transnational Communities. Durham, Duke University Press. 2004. 385 pp. 67 illustrations. Paper, $23.95. Kamari Maxine Clarke's Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in Making of Transnational Communities is a theoretical ethnographic study of Oyotunji Village, an intentional religious community in Beaufort, South Carolina. Founded in 1970 by Walter Eugene King, who later was crowned Oba Ofuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I, after his initiation into cult of Ifa in Abeokuta, in western Nigeria. As political outgrowth of a separatist community during Civil Rights-Black Power movement and basically product of King's own racial consciousness and interpretation of his Orishavodu-centered black nationalism, Oyotunji Village emerged as an invented alternative New World culture, committed to invocation and reclamation of African ancestry, specifically Yoruba traditions. Its name, meaning literally awakens/rises again, is derived from ancient and powerful Old Oyo Empire of Yoruba in present-day western Nigeria. Despite its claimed conceptual frame of reference as primarily Yoruba, Oyotunji is an eclectic melange of African borrowings from Dahomean, Egyptian, Ashanti, and other cultures; and its origins and existence clearly an expression of 20th- and 21st-century black cultural nationalism. At core of long and illustrious history of black nationalist movements in 19th and 20th centuries are visions of, or outright calls for, formation of black identities and racial alliances outside African continent. The results of these formations and their widespread influences have provided ample research data for numerous studies and interesting theories by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists, religion scholars, and literary artists alike. The 19th century black nationalist ideas, championed by proponents such as Paul Cuffe, Martin Delany, Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry McNeal Turner and others, paved way for actions of 20th century black nationalists and movements such as Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association; W. E. B. Du Bois and Pan Africanism; Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, and Nation of Islam; and Black Panthers and Black Power movement. Notwithstanding various types of ideologies among its proponents, concept of black nationalism has spanned entire spectrum of emigrationism, Pan-Africanism, cultural, religious, economic, and political nationalism--each one a response to marginalization of African Americans in United States on basis of their African background. Not unlike every known nationalist movement or ideology, underlying principle and impetus for black nationalism is search for forms of self-definition, self-determination, and empowerment. While resulting search for African American roots and identity from 1960s to 1980s has taken many forms, from rhetoric to calls for physical and cultural separation, perhaps none has tasked imagination and generated such a range of reactions--from sheer curiosity to genuine interest--as much as phenomenon of spatial geographies and transnational revivalism which Oyotunji represents. Since 1960s Yoruba revivalism has flourished with the development of African-based religious diasporic movements such as Ashanti-Ghanaian, Haitian voodoo, Brazilian Candomble, and Yoruba orisa, effect of which has moved black cultural nationalism from margins. Noting slow emergence of serious scholarship on dynamics of memory and replication, Clarke has blazed trail in her innovative and sophisticated example of multi-sited data collection, preparation and apprenticeship, result of which is a fascinating chronicle of efforts made by a small band of U. …