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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Afro-Cuban religions
• Asian diaspora
• critical archival studies
• Afro-Asian religiosity
• Caribbean religions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection is the largest repository of materials on or about Cuba and its diaspora located outside of Cuba. Lydia Cabrera’s archive was made possible through the efforts of the founding generation of Cuban librarians, in particular Rosa Abella and Ana Rosa Núñez at the Otto G. Richter Library. The collection is open to the public to consult, and a growing number of materials digitized are available online at https://library.miami.edu/chc/.

2 My translation of the Spanish text, ‘para el cual algunos practicantes reservan un espacio dentro de su mobiliario’ and ‘sin embargo no se ha comprobado la existencia de un culto particular de a San Fan Cón dentro de la Santería’ (Baltar Rodríguez 1997, 183).

3 The full title of the work is El Monte: Igbo, finda, ewe orisha, vititi nfinda: Notas sobre las religiones, la magia, las supersticiones y el folklore de los negros criollos y del pueblo de Cuba. It has been published in Cuba and the United States and in other languages, including French. An English-language translation by David Font-Navarrete has been published by Duke University Press in 2023.

4 While not an exhaustive list of published work on divination, notable texts that focus on various Afro-Atlantic orisha and Ifá divination include Abimbọla (1976; 1977); Bascom (1969; 1980); Cuoco (2014); FAMA (1994); Ferreira (1997); Gleason, Aworinde, and Ogundipe (1973); Holbraad (2012); Maupoil (1943); Olupona and Abiodun (2016); and Verger, Feuser, and Carneiro da Cunha (1989).

5 J. S. Baró, Lydia Cabrera’s participant. Lydia Cabrera Papers, collection CHC0339, series: IV. Photographs, n.d., 1901–1991. Container Box No. 40. Folder No. 23 Folder Title: Informants Folder Date: n.d.

6 By Sevilla Baró, Babalawo Oshé Yekun as recorded by Lydia Cabrera. Lydia Cabrera papers CHC0339 Box 24 of 75.