Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the contribution of Latin American religious elites to the making of a 'Black Atlantic'. The attempts to standardise Afro-American religions generate new ways of religious 'creolisation' in which the syncretic work is resignified, producing new definitions of African tradition.

Paper long abstract:

Afro-American religions are historically distinguished by their extreme fragmentation and lack of a superior authority that could impose orthodox rules and practices to its followers. Nonetheless, some religious leaders aim today for an unification of their practices that highlights the existence of a common ground in all Afro-American religious modalities. Since the early eighties there have been various attempts to standardise the different Afro-American religious practices on the American continent. The International Congresses of Orisha Tradition and Culture (also called COMTOC or Orisa World Congresses) have helped to create a wider network between the initiates of Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodu, North American Orisha-Voodoo and Yoruba "traditional religion". These attempts generate new ways of religious "creolization," in which the syncretic work - the historical base of these types of religions - is resignified, giving preference to African or Afro-American endogenous variables instead of European or Catholic exogenous influences. The ritual borrowings, in the lucumí religion of Cubans living in Miami, of practices that originated in Brazilian Candomblé are a telling example of this founding tension between unification and fragmentation within these religious phenomena.

In this paper, I will address the issues of tradition and preservation of a "collective African memory" within Afro-American religions, focusing on Brazilian Candomblé. We will see that the tension between continuity and discontinuity, between Africa and the New World, can also be found in other religions originating in Africa, such as Cuban Santería. The COMTOC congresses are key to the diffusion of several practices, values and views of tradition in the core of a transnational network that unites African initiates and their diaspora counterparts in the Americas, in that translocal field referred today as the "Black Atlantic". In this confrontation of different practices and ethics, two definitions of "African" tradition seem to represent the often difficult relationships between "orisha religion" practitioners: one tradition linked to the diaspora and another to Yorubaland. This paper aims to draw attention to the contribution of Latin-American religious elites to the making of the "Black Atlantic", as well as their participation to the rise of new cultural essentialisms in this transnational field.