Paper short abstract:

Time, historical consciousness and historicity remain insufficiently explored, especially in that corner of Black Atlantic studies that focuses on African diasporic language practices, where the search for 'Africanisms' continues unabated within historical linguistics and Creole studies.

Paper long abstract:

The "Black Atlantic" is a chronotopically charged concept whose elaboration requires us to attend to how meaningful historical connections are forged, both locally and in wider circuits, with a past variously imagined as "African" and "diasporic." Anthropologists of the Black Atlantic such as Stephan Palmié and Kevin Yelvington have begun to explore how modes of historical consciousness inform racial subjectivities. And yet, issues of time, historical consciousness, and historicity remain insufficiently explored, especially in that corner of Black Atlantic studies that focuses on African diasporic language practices. In most linguistically-oriented studies of the African diaspora, the search for "Africanisms" continues unabated within paradigms of historical linguistics and creole studies.

In this paper I critically examine how such scholarship itself produces particular modes of historical consciousness and therefore of history by comparing scholars’ and nonscholarly ("local") recuperations of African diasporic history through their language practices and linguistic ideologies. For example, practitioners of Cuban Santería seek to reconstruct the "roots" of Santería's "Yoruba" ritual register and thus to recuperate history both via more textual etymological analysis and via more performative "divinations" of hidden or lost meanings. They also engage in ritual modes of "temporal telescoping" through which the recuperated past becomes transcendent and mythic. I suggest that Cuban religious practitioners’ efforts to recuperate the past can illuminate the efforts of linguits and other scholars of the Black Atlantic, who are also often engaged in "divining" the past by recovering "lost" or hidden memories and meanings and by their own modes of "temporal telescoping" to show the relevance of those histories in the present.