The Lettered City Unbound: Ritual Drawing and the Production of Power in Nineteenth-Century Havana (dissertation) (2025)

"Pens as Swords: Criticisms of practices of African origin in 19th century Cuban culture"

Islas Quarterly Journal of Afro-Cuban issue, 2007

In this essay, I argue that Cuban costumbrista writers such as Luis Victoriano Betancourt, wrote with the objective of pointing out and doing away with customs and exogenous elements that were contaminating “la Cuba blanca y española” (White Spanish Cuba). They criticized the influence of African dances, slangs and religion in Cuba, waging a war with their "pens" as Cuban liberators did with their "machetes."

Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (Brown)

Museum Anthropology Review, 2008

Reviewed by Kristina Wirtz David H. Brown's beautifully produced and important book, Santería Enthroned, is one case in which a book can and perhaps should be judged by its cover. Brown's project on Santería ritual, aesthetics, and historical change is ambitious: he combines the methods and materials of anthropology, art history, and social history, among other disciplines, to consider what this case can contribute to the ongoing debate over the source of African diasporic cultural forms. A major contribution of the book is to challenge the very terms of the debate between Africanist and Creolist interpretations of origins. He engages both Sidney Mintz and Richard Price's "rapid creolization" model and the Herskovitsian "African retentions" paradigm still apparent in Robert Farris Thompson's art historical analyses, which seek to reveal African continuities beneath changes in diasporic forms. Brown advocates Stephan Palmié's "New World ethnogenesis" model, which envisions innovation-creative responses to changing conditions by historically self-conscious actors-as the driver of cultural change and continuity alike. His analysis shatters any simplistic dichotomy of change versus continuity, and in doing so goes beyond any previous work on Santería to provide the most careful and historically nuanced account of this religion's origins and contemporary practices yet written.

The 'Painting' of Black History: The Afro-Cuban Codex of José Antonio Aponte (Havana, Cuba, 1812)

Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion by David H. Brown

African Arts, 2007

From its emergence as a field of inquiry well over one hundred years ago, a body of literature in African Diaspora studies has been focused on the identification of connections between cultural manifestations in Africa and the Americas. David H. Brown's Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion and the edited volume by Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs titled The Yoruba l)iaspora in the Atlantic World both serve as progressive studies that push the field to an even more nuanced exploration of not only the nature, but also the systematic developinent of "Africanisms" in the trans-Atlantic world. More specifically, the authors explore the construction of an explicitly Yoruba identity and culture in the African Diaspora over time. Both texts assert that the presence of a large number of people of Yoruba descent in specific locations in the Americas (Cuba and Bahia, Brazil, being key sites with especially high numbers of people who identified as Yoruba, particularly in the nineteenth century) does not alone explain the high level of cultural influence. Brown and several of the authors presented in The Yoruba Diaspora seek to identify how and why a highly visible Yoruba-centered culture developed in Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere in the Americas. As Brown states: "Numbers do not guarantee enduring cultural influence, and, more specifically, cultural influence does not guarantee religious persistence" (p. 77). By what process then, the authors ask, did Yoruba culture emerge in the Diaspora and how has it maintained a persistent position of dominance within the subaltern Diaspora culture?

Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion by David H. Brown Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xx + 413 pp., 27 color, 108 b/w illustrations, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $95.00 (cloth), $38.00 (softcover). The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic Worl...

African Arts, 2007

des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998.

Kristine Juncker, Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santeria (2014)

Pomegranate: The International Journal for Pagan Studies, 2015

Review of Kristine Juncker's 2014 book on University of Florida Press.

Memories of the Future: Across the Afro-Hispanic and U.S. Latino/a and Chicano/a Americas. Review Essay of Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812 and Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies. H-LatAm (December, 2010). 1-5. Online.

A Transatlantic Restoration of Religion: On the Re-construction of Yoruba and Lúkúmí in Cuban Santería

Art of the Hispanic World, 1492-1665

The visual arts carried out a wide array of crucial cultural work across the vast and shifting network of territories encompassed by the Spanish empire between the beginning of the conquest in 1492 and the death of Philip IV in 1665. This course will consider some of the practical, theoretical, esthetic, spiritual, and political functions that works of art performed in a selection of locales from this enormous empire, ranging from Madrid, Granada, and Lisbon, to Naples, Antwerp, Tenochtitlan, and Cuzco. What were the prerogatives and powers of images in and across these different venues? How did these prerogatives change when the images in question underwent the physical and cultural displacements of colonialism and global commerce? What did the producers and consumers of images think of themselves as producing and consuming in these cultural settings? We will explore a wide variety of art historical approaches, from traditional and canonical texts to recent interventions.

Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America. By Jerome C. Branche (ed.). Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015, p. 280, $24.95

The Latin Americanist, 2017