Description: The Yoruba Are on a Rock focuses on the Africans who arrived in Grenada decades after the abolition of the British slave trade and how they radically shaped the religious and cultural landscape of the island. Rooted in extensive archival and ethnographic research, Shantel A. George carefully traces and unpacks the complex movements of people and ideas between various points in western Africa and the Eastern Caribbean to argue that Orisa worship in Grenada is not, as has been generally supposed, a residue of recaptive Yoruba peoples, but emerged from dynamic and multi-layered exchanges within and beyond Grenada. Further, the book shows how recaptives pursued freedom by drawing on shared African histories and experiences in the homeland and in Grenada, and recovers intriguing individual biographies of the recaptives, their descendants, and religious custodians. By historicising this island's little-known and fascinating tradition, the book advances our knowledge of African diaspora cultures and histories.
Brief description: Shantel A. George is Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on African-derived cultures and identities in the British Caribbean and the global circulation of African commodities. This is her first book.
Review Quotes: 'George illuminates the little-known cultural impact of the 52,000 Africans rescued from slave ships and resettled in the British Caribbean. In the eastern Caribbean, these 'recaptives' from the Bight of Benin crafted religions called 'Shango' and 'African Work, ' whose charismatic Yoruba-identified leaders incorporated elements of Roman Catholicism, Seventh-Day Adventism, European magic, Hinduism, and multiple western African religions. No student of the wider Black Atlantic should overlook this important 'infra-Atlantic' case.' J. Lorand Matory, Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Collection, Duke University