“Sacred Africana, Aquatic: Exploring Abundance and Scarcity Through Ritual in Burkina Faso, Cuba, and Haiti” (Institute of Sacred Music)

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. This webinar panel brings together scholars of Africana religious cultures together to 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 dialogue 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.

 

Free and open to the public, but registration is required.

 

Speakers:

 

Maya Berry

Meredith Coleman-Tobia

Christina Taina Desert

Rachel Elizabeth Harding

Sponsored by the Institute of Sacred Music’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative.