The Lithic Imagination and the Tertia: The Longian Paradigm and Art in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religion

Abstract

Scholar Charles Long offers a paradigm for exploring the meaning of African American religion. This article explores the applicability of Long's methodology to other Afro-Atlantic religious traditions, such as Brazilian Candomblé and Haitian Vodou, by means of an examination of two artistic/interpretive concepts—the lithic imagination and the tertia. Succinctly, the lithic imagination is that aspect of human consciousness that bears similarities to the natural form of the stone—which is to say, the creative will to resistance, especially as manifested in religious expression. The tertia, a more ephemeral and less easily defined idea, is the surplus of the encounter of the colonized and the colonizer. It is the “third thing,” the unacknowledged history of modernity, the distressed ancestral presences which are dynamic (if often occluded) forces necessary to a full reckoning of the religious history of the Blacks in the diaspora.

Keywords:

• African American religion
• Afro-Atlantic religion
• art
• Candomblé
• Charles H. Long
• John Biggers
• lithic imagination
• modernity
• Patrick Chamoiseau
• tertia
• Veve Clark
• Vodou

Notes

Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 1999).

The 2012 AAR session was a project of the Art/s of Interpretation working group, coordinated by Jennifer Reid and Davíd Carrasco.

Rachel Elizabeth Harding, You Got a Right to the Tree of Life: African American Spirituals and Religions of the Diaspora, “Sweet Chariot: The Story of the Spirituals.” Last modified 2005. http://ctl.du.edu/spirituals/Religion/.

The term comes also from philosopher Enrique Dussel's The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the Philosophy of Liberation (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), where it is used to similar effect.

Long, Significations, 201.

Long, Significations, 192.

Rachel E. Harding, “É a Senzala: Slavery, Women and Embodied Knowledge in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé,” in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power and Performance, ed. R. Marie Griffith and Barbara D. Savage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 14.

Ibid., 15.

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).

Vèvè Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness,” Theatre Survey 50 (2009): 9–18.

Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1983), 103.

I see these diasporic resonances to Long's framework particularly in the ways other Blacks in the Americas, beyond the United States, have also used the imagery and institutions “at hand” to give voice and meaning to their experiences as enslaved and oppressed people. (In Significations, Long notes that African Americans used Christianity and Biblical imagery “because it was at hand,” 193). One thinks immediately of the role of cofradias/cabildos in Cuba and irmandades in Brazil as institutions respected in the broader society that were available and politic choices for Africans and their descendants (re)creating religious meaning on hostile ground. Votive foods—such as okra, corn, black-eyed peas, and yams are another place where alternative ritual meanings were emplaced within “what was at hand.”.

Long, Significations, 5.

Long, Significations, 6.

Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness,” 10–11.

John Biggers: Painting for the People, Veterans of Hope Project Pamphlet Series 3, No. 1 (Denver, CO: The Veterans of Hope Project, 2010).

Ibid.

Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima (Berkeley, CA: Tonatiuh International, 1972).

The Big Read: A Conversation with Rudolfo Anaya (film), dir. Lawrence Bridges, National Endowment for the Arts, 2009.