A Refuge in Thunder: Candombl and Alternative Spaces of Blackness by Rach - Essay Example

Reading Chapters Two and Four of Refuge in Thunder, my immediate reaction was to question how much our ideas of blackness had been controlled by anAnglocentric view and lens looking at the African-American experience. For example: In America, most traditional African religion tended to vanish and be replaced with Christianity. Laurence Levine in Black Culture, Black Consciousness famously noted how black religion and mythology survived in stories like Brer Rabbit, interpretations of Christianity, etc.

, so that the loss was not complete, and was more of a syncretic combination than a surrender to Christianity. Yet certainly, as I looked at Bahia and the other religious experiences that Harding reviewed, I felt that the ratio of Christianity to African religion had been overwhelmingly towards the white end in America while in Latin America it was very different. Voodoo, Santeria, Rastafarianism. these are very different. I was also reminded harshly of the way that, in Latin America, blackness is more complicated and yet still as important.

We have a sharp divide between white, black, Asian, Latina/o, etc. But in Latin America, commingling and miscegenation between the native population, the slaves and the European settlers created a combination of skin tones and features ranging from almost entirely native to largely white. There's an informal array of power based off that. Finally, I was astonished by the way that the Salvadoran and Brazilian experience in everything from slavery to the vagabond issue varied from the American one.