AMERICAS FORUM

The Center for the Americas sponsors a yearly Americas Forum.

The theme of the forum reflects the Center's commitment to interdisciplinary and hemispheric studies.

Anthropologists and historians have long noted that a host of local cosmologies throughout Africa link witchcraft and sorcerery  with the forced or contracted deployment of persons or spirits in a phantom-like "second universe" where they perform various kinds of labor for their living proprietors, special imagery recalling the history of the transatlantic slave trade.  More recently, scholars have pointed to the deeply occult nature of global economic forces- i.e., their experimental opaqueness, moral ambiguities, fearsome qualities, (not to mention their seductions), and their role in fueling the expansion of local economies of occult power and social predation.  To what extent can the same be said of the poetics and politics of social predation and the historical experience of modernizing forces and projects in the greater Afro-Atlantic world? Here spectral images embodied in such figures as the Haitian zonbi, ritual fetishes like the Cuban nganga, or the Brazilian exu spirits suggest the continuing haunts and terrors associated with the slave past in the cosmology, magic, and ritual of Afro-Creole communities throughout the Americas. Much less is known about the ways these magical and ritual evocations of the past, these spectral yet embodied histories of conquest, slavery, colonialism and wage labor continue to shape the ways these communities interpret and react to global economic forces. This forum symposium features scholars whose work explores the ways in which contemporary Afro-Creole communities throughout the Americas confront the various haunts associated with post modernity and neoliberalism, particularly the moral status of contemporary global economic flows and the circulation if hidden forms of power-knowledge.