Historiographical Paper Proposal

Cludio Daflon

The Yoruba Diaspora and the development of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian

religion
Following the understanding of Yoruba Diaspora as a study of both sides of the
Atlantic and taking into account the possibility of conceptualizing a Yoruba transatlantic
nation, as framed by Toyin Falola and Matt Childs in the collection The Yoruba
Diaspora in the Atlantic World, my proposal is to study the development of AfroAmerican religions in Cuba and Brazil, focusing on their connection to the Yoruba
tradition, the process of creolization, and the transnational perspectives explored by
recent scholars of different spheres of knowledge. Im particularly interested in the shifts
in religions such as Candombl, Santera and Umbanda, and the relation with the
modernization discourses in those countries; the idea is to investigate if traditional Cuban
and Brazilian cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced
modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations.
I plan to analyze how scholars have been portraying the process in which those
religions emerged and developed in Cuba and Brazil out of transplanted Yoruba beliefs
and how they continue to spread and adjust to changing times and contexts. In this sense,
I will address the construction or reconstruction of ethnicity among those groups and
investigate the idea that those religions evolved as a function of a multi-conceptual
interaction, including dimensions of sacred practice, superstition, folklore, tradition and
popular culture.
In the same way that interpretations of Santera are related to distinct concepts of
cubanidad, Candombl and Umbanda are related to concepts about brasilidade. I want to
explore how those religions developed as simultaneously the product of and one of the
greatest producers of a transoceanic culture and political economy known as the Black
Atlantic, as James Matory states in
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Beyond an account of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian religions developed in

strong connection to Yoruba tradition, and their relations to national identity, gender and
race, I plan to address as a last aspect the process by which practitioners have adapted
received beliefs and practices to reconcile them with new environments, in processes of
re-territorialization that are examples of transnationalization from below.