A01=Toni Pressley-Sanon
Africa
African diaspora
Author_Toni Pressley-Sanon
Benin Republic
Category=AGA
Category=NHH
Category=NHK
cultural
cultural exchange
cultural production
cultural traditions
Dahomey
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Haiti
Haitian Art
Haitian Culture
Haitian history
istwa
Kamau Brathwaite
Kongo region
Kreyol term istwa
marasa
Material Culture
motherland
oral stories
Oral Tradition
slave trade
spiritual
spiritual traditions
Story
tidalectics
Toni Pressley Sanon
transatlantic movement
twinned entities
visual art
Vodou
voodoo
Product details
- ISBN 9780813054407
- Weight: 455g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 04 Apr 2017
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Gathering oral stories and visual art from both sides of the Atlantic, Istwa across the Water stitches together fragmented parts of the African diaspora. Toni Pressley-Sanon challenges the tendency to read history linearly and recovers the submerged histories of Haiti through alternative methods rooted in the island’s spiritual and cultural traditions.
Using the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, this book takes parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region—from where many Haitians are descended—as Haiti’s twinned sites of cultural production. It draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite’s idea of tidalectics, the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves, as a way to look at cultural exchange. Above all, it searches out the places where history and memory intersect, expressed by the Kreyòl term istwa, offering a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.
Using the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, this book takes parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region—from where many Haitians are descended—as Haiti’s twinned sites of cultural production. It draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite’s idea of tidalectics, the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves, as a way to look at cultural exchange. Above all, it searches out the places where history and memory intersect, expressed by the Kreyòl term istwa, offering a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.
Toni Pressley-Sanon, assistant professor of African and African American studies at Eastern Michigan University, is the author of The Haitian Peasantry through Oral and Written Literature.
