Ifá/Orisha Digital Counterpublics

Abstract

“I fá/Orisha Digital Counterpublics” offers an ethnographic reflection on post-Ferguson social justice initiatives in African Diasporic religions (ADRs), organized largely on social media, viewing them as part of a digital counterpublic. The opening section includesmethodology in digital ethnography, touches on the literature on the digital and ADRs, and introduces an interpretive framework of spiritual citizenship in action. The second section recounts my experience of joining a Facebook initiative to “wear white” while praying for peace and social justice through an organization called Oloshas United. Following that I explore an Ifá Temple that uses multiple social media modalities, including live streaming, to organize across the US and beyond, forming a virtual collectivity that supported in person rituals towards collective social change. Together these examples speak of a spiritual praxis, that is, the deployment of ritual to affect change. The closing section raises questions directed at ADRs contribution to social justice organizing and digital counterpublics as an example of spiritual citizenship in action. When speaking of African Diasporic religions in digital space I mean specifically computer-mediated-communication and other technologies in the building, experience, and expression of African diaspora religious communities and their attending ritual practices, with a generous and expansive category that includes various forms: Yorùbá informed religions, Vodoun, Akan, Kumina, and Rastafari, among many others. To inform my discussion of ADRs online I draw on the growing body of scholarship in Digital Religion Studies and Black Digital Humanities (including Black cyberspace studies and Black code studies) and put these literatures into conversation with an ethnographic analysis grounded in the scholarship of Black Studies, Caribbean and African Diaspora Studies, and Black Feminist Studies. These scholarships led me to view ADR online organizing through the conceptualization of digital counterpublics, defined by Hill as “any virtual, online, or otherwise digitally networked community in which members actively resist hegemonic power, contest majoritarian narratives, engage in critical dialogues, or negotiate oppositional identities.” I find this definition to be useful in this context for linking online social activism with organizing in the ADR community over the past decades.