African archives in the Caribbean: the yoruba tradition, cultural experts, and the unmaking of religious knowledge in twentieth-century Trinidad

ABSTRACT Attending to how religious custodians, colonial agents, and scholars have exchanged knowledge across sites in Africa and the Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article raises questions about continuities and ruptures in religious traditions that challenge perceptions of homelands as sites of stable, originary knowledges/heritages and diasporas as sites of improvised and severed knowledges/heritages. Highlighting the Yoruba-Orisa1 religion in Trinidad as a rich diasporic site to work through these issues, I employ a transdisciplinary methodology to argue that historicizing and theorizing African heritage religions that have unfolded around and in the wake of the events of the transatlantic slave trade require comparative research methods – historical, sociolinguistic, phenomenological, decolonial, material cultural studies – that facilitate critical explorations of the multidirectional circulation of expert religious knowledge between Africa and its diasporas. In so doing, we can examine the Caribbean and the Americas not only as sites of African diasporic archives and religious history but also as archival diasporas of African continental religious and socio-political history.