Imagining the past, remembering the future : forms of knowledge in the Afro-Brazilian diaspora /
"Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future investigates overlooked African diasporic forms of knowledge, art, history, religion, philosophy, and cosmology. Oral traditions, all too often a taboo subject among academics, are sources of knowledge that allow us to recognize the creative poetics a...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2026]
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| Series: | Black lives in the diaspora.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future investigates overlooked African diasporic forms of knowledge, art, history, religion, philosophy, and cosmology. Oral traditions, all too often a taboo subject among academics, are sources of knowledge that allow us to recognize the creative poetics and historical accounts found in "folk" culture that have influenced diasporic literatures as well as national and philosophical identities. Through axes established along routes connecting Central and West Africa to the Americas, the book explores the millenary archives of African civilizations that have over centuries transformed themselves in their new communities. To conceptualize the great African diasporic archive, we need to be able to recognize a different historical dynamic that leads us to multiple spheres of communication and convergences. Fabulations and poetic constructions of divinized geographies, enchanted spaces in the African diaspora; genealogies of symbolic, historical, and mythological heroic beings that rarely protagonized the fictions of official history; and ancestral times, "grassroots" technologies, and alternative understandings of time and history have formed a body of diverse forms of cultural production, including parades of Black royal courts, Carnival performing groups, oracular literature, "spirit-dictated" novels, and the contemporary production of the Wi-Fi diaspora connecting artivists (activists and artists) to Africa, Europe, and the Americas. "Remembering the future" references Toni Morrison's conceptualization of "rememory" as a fictional practice of recollecting and reassembling members of families, bodies, and pasts. Rebuilding the past in the present, Morrison proposes a challenging reconstructive historiography that centralizes and animates a reality unlike that of the West, discredited not because it is not true or useful but because it is held by discredited people. Similarly, "imagining the past" acknowledges Sadiya Hartman's proposal to redress history by reconstruction through speculative narration of what could have been. Together, Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future is an invitation to continuously revisit the Black Atlantic past, rememorize and recognize what we were once unable to see, claim the inheritance of different processes of knowing, and reassemble the present as the future wave crashes down, so that history can become, as Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, argues, "not an account or analysis of events only; but something nearer, more urgent; part of the blood and dream.""-- Provided by publisher. |
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| Physical Description: | xviii, 420 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231212625 0231212623 9780231212632 0231212631 |