Paper short abstract:

I argue that ritual dress in such religions as Candomblé and Santería not just helped to create an imagine a Black identity outside of Africa, but also forms by its shared aesthetics a community across borders. This shared visual language thus forms an alternative form of archive of the diaspora.

Paper long abstract:

The African Atlantic Diaspora, formed in the in the Americas and Caribbean Islands, while divided by force and separated by language still created a “community in performance born out of the struggle for emancipation” (Gilroy 1993, as cited in Werbner und Fumanti 2013). This performance of a community, the black diaspora of the Americas, is most profoundly in its cultural practices. These performative and aesthetic codes transcend boarders and languages, forming an underlying ‘oneness’ in the diaspora (Hall 2021). Diaspora aesthetics thus function as a tool to claim “ownership of places and nations” (Werbner und Fumanti 2013), a tool widely wielded by the survivors of the Middle Passage to re-create a history and identity in those new lands.

Examining especially at the dress practices of diaspora religions such as Candomblé (Brazil) and Santería (Cuba) which invent and imagine a Black identity and culture in the diaspora, aside of or in opposition to a colonial system of oppression. Thus, looking at the fabrics that enshroud the worldly representative of gods and spirits in ritual contexts this project aims to decode the histories and aesthetic legacies woven into these dresses.

I argue that these practices play an integral part in the performance and consciousness of blackness in the diaspora. Ritual costumes constitute alternative archives of a people, as they are adorned with codes and references to past and present cultural entanglements, occurrences and mythologies.