Ingesting indenture: Lydia Cabrera, yellow blindness, Chinese bodies, and the generation of Afro-Chinese religious knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the ways that Afro-Cuban religious texts called libretas and recorded oral divination narratives create entryways for Asian, especially Chinese, deities in the practice of Afro-Cuban religions, specifically the Yorùbá-derived orisha religion known as Lucumí. Lydia Cabrera, a self-taught ethnographer of Afro-Cuban religions, is a pivotal interlocutor in the generation of Afro-Chinese knowledge, having conducted fieldwork with practitioners of both African and Asian descent in Cuba whose ancestors were taken to Cuba as enslaved and unfree plantation labourers. Cabrera’s many published volumes, as well as her archive posthumously housed at the University of Miami, are important sources of information for both religious scholars and practitioners. By examining the exemplary divinatory narrative of the orisha Shangó travelling to China, as documented by Cabrera, we can better understand the processes of enmeshing, recording, and sharing of African and Asian knowledge and worldviews occurring in Afro-Atlantic religious practices.