This study investigates how Yoruba migrants make meaning of Yoruba Indigenous knowledges in the African Diaspora, specifically within the geopolitical space of dominant Canadian culture. This research is informed by the lived experiences of 16 Africans of Yoruba descent now living in Toronto, Canada, and explores how these first and second generation migrants construct the spiritual and linguistic dimensions of Yoruba Indigenous identities in their everyday lives. While Canada is often imagined as a sanctuary for progressive politics, it nonetheless is also a hegemonic space where inequities continue to shape the social engagements of everyday life. Hence, this dissertation situates the historical and contemporary realities of colonialism and imperialism, by beginning with the premise that people in diasporic Yoruba communities are continuously affected by the complicated interplay of various forms of oppression such as racism, and inequities based on language, gender and religion. This study is situated within a socio–historical and cosmological context to effectively examine colonialism’s impact on Yoruba Indigenous knowledges. Yet, inversely, this study also involves discussion of how these knowledges are utilized as decolonizing tools of navigation, subversion and resistance. The central focus of this research is the articulation of colonial oppression and how it has reconfigured Yoruba Indigenous identities even within a purportedly ‘multicultural’ space. First, the historical dis/continuities of the Yoruba language in Yorubaland are investigated. This strand of the research considers British colonization, and more specifically, the Church Missionary Society’s (CMS) efforts at translating the Bible into Yoruba as pivotal in the colonial project. What kinds of categories does missionary education create that differ from pre-colonial categories of Yoruba Indigenous identity? How are these new identities shaped along lines of race and gender? In other words, what happens when Yoruba cosmology encounters colonialism? The second strand of this research investigates how these historical colonialisms have set the framework for enduring contemporary colonialisms that continue to fracture Yoruba Indigenous knowledges. This dissertation offers insights relevant to diversity and equitable pedagogy through careful consideration of the complicated strategies used by participants in their negotiations of Yoruba identities within a context of social inequity and colonialism.

This study investigates how Yoruba migrants make meaning of Yoruba Indigenous knowledges in the African Diaspora, specifically within the geopolitical space of dominant Canadian culture. This research is informed by the lived experiences of 16 Africans of Yoruba descent now living in Toronto, Canada, and explores how these first and second generation migrants construct the spiritual and linguistic dimensions of Yoruba Indigenous identities in their everyday lives. While Canada is often imagined as a sanctuary for progressive politics, it nonetheless is also a hegemonic space where inequities continue to shape the social engagements of everyday life. Hence, this dissertation situates the historical and contemporary realities of colonialism and imperialism, by beginning with the premise that people in diasporic Yoruba communities are continuously affected by the complicated interplay of various forms of oppression such as racism, and inequities based on language, gender and religion. This study is situated within a socio–historical and cosmological context to effectively examine colonialism’s impact on Yoruba Indigenous knowledges. Yet, inversely, this study also involves discussion of how these knowledges are utilized as decolonizing tools of navigation, subversion and resistance. The central focus of this research is the articulation of colonial oppression and how it has reconfigured Yoruba Indigenous identities even within a purportedly ‘multicultural’ space. First, the historical dis/continuities of the Yoruba language in Yorubaland are investigated. This strand of the research considers British colonization, and more specifically, the Church Missionary Society’s (CMS) efforts at translating the Bible into Yoruba as pivotal in the colonial project. What kinds of categories does missionary education create that differ from pre-colonial categories of Yoruba Indigenous identity? How are these new identities shaped along lines of race and gender? In other words, what happens when Yoruba cosmology encounters colonialism? The second strand of this research investigates how these historical colonialisms have set the framework for enduring contemporary colonialisms that continue to fracture Yoruba Indigenous knowledges. This dissertation offers insights relevant to diversity and equitable pedagogy through careful consideration of the complicated strategies used by participants in their negotiations of Yoruba identities within a context of social inequity and colonialism.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Thesis (MA (English Literature))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / Notions of home, belonging, and identity haunt the creative minds of fiction writers belonging to and imagining the African diaspora. Detailing the ways in which two diasporic authors “re-visit history” and “re-negotiate identity”, this thesis grapples with the complexity of these notions and explores the boundaries of displacement and the search for new home-spaces. Finally, it engages with the ways in which both authors produce “new tribes” beyond the bounds of national or racial imaginaries. Following the “introduction”, the second chapter titled “River Crossing” offers a reading of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, which features a black African man fleeing his home-country in search of asylum in England. Here, I explore Phillips’s representation of the “postcolonial passage” to the north, and of the “shock of arrival” in England. I then analyse the ways in which the novel enacts a process of “messing with national identity”. While retracing the history of post-Windrush migration to England in order to engage contemporary immigration, A Distant Shore, I argue, also re-visits the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the final section, I discuss “the economy of asylum” as I explore the fates of the novel’s two central characters: the African asylum-seeker and the outcast white English woman. My reading aims to advance two points made by the novel. Firstly, that individuals are not contained by the nations and cultures they belong to; rather, they are owned by the circumstances that determine the conditions of their displacement. Phillips strives to tell us that individuals remain the sites at which exclusionary discourses and theories about race, belonging and identity are re-elaborated. Secondly, I argue that no matter the effort exerted in trying to forget traumatic pasts in order to re-negotiate identity elsewhere, individuals remain prisoners of the chronotopes they have inhabited at the various stages of their passages. The third chapter focuses on Buchi Emecheta’s The New Tribe. Titled “Returning Home?”, it explores the implications of Emecheta’s reversal of the trajectory of displacement from diasporic locations to Africa. The New Tribe allows for the possibility of re-imagining the Middle Passage and re-figuring the controversial notion of the return to roots. In the novel, a young black British man embarks on a journey to Africa in search of a mythic lost kingdom. While not enabling him to return to roots, this journey eventually encourages him to come to terms with his diasporic identity. Continuing to grapple with notions of “home”, now through the trope of family and by engaging the “rhetoric of return”, I explore how Emecheta re-visits the past in order to produce new identities in the present. Emecheta’s writing reveals in particular the gendered consequences of the “rhetoric of return”. Narratives of return to Africa, the novel suggests, revisit colonial fantasies and foster patriarchal gender bias. The text juxtaposes such metaphors against the lived experience of black women in order to demythologise the return to Africa and to redirect diasporic subjects to the diasporic locations that constitute genuine sites for re-negotiating identity.

A pesquisa empírica desta dissertação foi realizada junto à comunidade do Boqueirão, em Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade/MT, no contexto sistêmico e arqueológico, entre 2008 e 2011. Através dela, procuramos interpretar processos culturais nessa área remanescente de quilombo, relacionados a elementos da paisagem, em especial as árvores. De um lado, consideramos a importância que as plantas ocupam nos cultos afro-brasileiros, e, de outro, o potencial mnemônico e distintivo das árvores, capazes de despertar recordações nesse grupo de afrodescendentes e sua memória. Os dados coletados no contexto sistêmico foram aplicados na interpretação do sítio arqueológico, com a intenção de ampliar a variação diacrônica da análise. Paralelamente ao levantamento no Boqueirão, realizamos pesquisa de campo em cinco terreiros de cultos afro-brasileiros, quatro em na região metropolitana de São Paulo e um na zona rural de Cuiabá. Chegamos a parte do passado familiar de membros dessa comunidade, e também de um passado ancestral, pois alguns dos dados obtidos estão relacionados até mesmo a suas origens africanas. Esta dissertação também tem como objetivo contribuir para o incremento dos estudos africanos e afro-brasileiros no campo da arqueologia. Concluímos que existem árvores cujo significado simbólico tem correspondência com o modo de pensamento da comunidade, tanto dos terreiros estudados, como aponta a literatura sobre a religiosidade afro-brasileira, quanto no quilombo do Boqueirão. Concluímos também que os estudos antropológicos e sociológicos sobre o Negro no Brasil deveriam ser mais considerados pela arqueologia e, sobretudo pela arqueologia da diáspora africana, uma das ramificações dessa disciplina em que se pautaram nossos estudos. / The empirical research of this dissertation was conducted in an archeological site in the Boqueirão community, in Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade (state of Mato Grosso, Brazil), in the systemic context between 2008 and 2011. Throughout this work, we have aimed to perceive cultural processes in this quilombo remnant area, related to certain landscape elements, especially trees. We have considered not only the important role of plants in the Afro-Brazilian religions, but their distinctive and mnemonic potential as well, able to bring up reminiscences in this afro-descendant group and its memory. Data collected in the systemic context were used for the interpretation of the archeological site, in order to broaden the diachronic variation of the analysis. Parallel to the data collection in Boqueirão, we have conducted field work in five Afro-Brazilian \"terreiros\" (places of worship), four in the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo and one in Cuiabá countryside (in the state of Mato Grosso). We were able to trace back to part of the family background of some members of this community, in addition to part of their ancient past, for some of the data obtained led to their African roots. This dissertation also aims to contribute to the general improvement of African and Afro-Brazilian studies in the field of Archaeology. We conclude that there are trees which bear a symbolic significance to the way of thinking of the community, both inside the studied \"terreiros\", in accordance with the Afro-Brazilian religion literature, and also in the Boqueirão Quilombo. We also conclude that anthropological and sociological studies about the black population in Brazil should be taken more into consideration by Archaeology, and, above all, by the Archaeology of the African Diaspora, one the branches of this field of study upon which our studies were based.

[pt] Esta pesquisa compreende como a religião afro-brasileira Candomblé se relaciona com o espaço físico em que acontece no mundo. Este lugar é chamado, carinhosamente, Roça. Estabelecendo a relação entre a cultura negra afrodiaspórica e a Arquitetura, revela-se uma forma muito particular de habitar. A religião, culturalmente, é um campo fértil de simbologias dessa existência, e contém aspectos cheios de significados do homem, do divino e do lugar. Dentre as religiões afrosiaspóricas, o Candomblé tem importância fundamental. Uma comunidade de resistência e de produção cultural, moldada pela mutabilidade, movimento e hibridação da diáspora negra. Buscou-se compreender os significados, os sentidos e as definições de cada elemento que compõe o universo da Roça de Candomblé: os elementos pré-existentes, construídos, naturais e as relações destes com a comunidade religiosa que compõe, com os deuses e ancestrais, os habitantes deste espaço metafísico afro-brasileiro. A dissertação foi desenvolvida através de grande revisão bibliográfica, e a pesquisa de campo etnográfica, com o processo de iniciação do autor no terreiro de Candomblé Ilê Axé Icimimó Aganju Didê, na cidade de Cachoeira, Bahia. Esse fato abre uma comunicação específica com a comunidade religiosa do Icimimó. A ideia é fazer da participação, um instrumento de conhecimento, despedaçando a dicotomia observador-objeto de observação. Neste processo são produzidos desenhos, plantas, arquivos fotográficos e entrevistas. Tecendo esta grande teia de referências se revela um novo Habitar no mundo. / [en] This research seeks to understand how the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé relates to the physical space in which it takes place in the world. This place is affectionately called Roça. Establishing the relationship between Afro-Diasporic black culture and Architecture, a very particular way of inhabiting is revealed. Religion, culturally, is a fertile field of symbology of this existence, and contains aspects full of meanings of man, the divine, and the place. Among black religions, Candomblé is of fundamental importance. A community of resistance and cultural production, shaped by the mutability, movement, and hybridization of the black diaspora. We sought to understand the meanings, senses, and definitions of each element that makes up the universe of Roça of Candomblé: the pre-existing, built, natural elements and their relationships with the religious community that composes, together with the gods and the ancestors, the inhabitants of this Afro-Brazilian metaphysical space. The dissertation was developed through a major bibliographic review, and ethnographic field research, with the author s initiation process in the terreiro of Candomblé Ilê Axé Icimimó Aganju Didê, in the city of Cachoeira, Bahia. This fact opens a specific communication with the religious community of Icimimó. The idea is to make participation an instrument of knowledge, breaking the observer-observation dichotomy. In this process, drawings, plans, photographic files and interviews are produced. Weaving this great web of references reveals a new Dwelling in the world.

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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation explores selected Indian narratives that emerge in South Africa and East Africa between 1960 and 2010, focusing on representations of migrations from the late 19th century, with the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism, to the early 21st century entry of immigrants into the metropolises of Europe, the US and Canada as part of the post-1960s upsurge in global migrations. The (post-)colonial and imperial sites that these narratives straddle re-echo Vijay Mishra‘s reading of Indian diasporic narratives as two autonomous archives designated by the terms, "old" and "new" diasporas. The study underscores the role of memory both in quests for legitimation and in making sense of Indian marginality in diasporic sites across the continent and in the global north, drawing together South Asia, Africa and the global north as continuous fields of analysis. Categorising the narratives from the two locations in their order of emergence, I explore how Ansuyah R. Singh‘s Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) and Bahadur Tejani‘s Day After Tomorrow (1971), as the first novels in English to be published by a South African and an East African writer of Indian descent, respectively, grapple with questions of citizenship and legitimation. I categorise subsequent narratives from South Africa into those that emerge during apartheid, namely, Ahmed Essop‘s The Hajji and Other Stories (1978), Agnes Sam‘s Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) and K. Goonam‘s Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr Goonam (1991); and in the post-apartheid period, including here Imraan Coovadia‘s The Wedding (2001) and Aziz Hassim‘s The Lotus People (2002) and Ronnie Govender‘s Song of the Atman (2006). I explore how narratives under the former category represent tensions between apartheid state – that aimed to reveal and entrench internal divisions within its borders as part of its technology of rule – and the resultant anti-apartheid nationalism that coheres around a unifying ―black‖ identity, drawing attention to how the texts complicate both apartheid and anti-apartheid strategies by simultaneously suggesting and bridging differences or divisions. Post-apartheid narratives, in contrast to the homogenisation of "blackness", celebrate ethnic self-assertion, foregrounding cultural authentication in response to the post-apartheid "rainbow-nation" project. Similarly, I explore subsequent East African narratives under two categories. In the first category I include Peter Nazareth‘s In a Brown Mantle (1972) and M.G. Vassanji‘s The Gunny Sack (1989) as two novels that imagine Asians‘ colonial experience and their entry into the post-independence dispensation, focusing on how this transition complicates notions of home and national belonging. In the second category, I explore Jameela Siddiqi‘s The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown‘s No Place Like Home (1996) and Shailja Patel‘s Migritude (2010) as post-1990 narratives that grapple with political backlashes that engender migrations and relocations of Asian subjects from East Africa to imperial metropolises. As part of the recognition of the totalising and oppressive capacities of culture, the three authors, writing from both within and without Indianness, invite the diaspora to take stock of its role in the fermentation of political backlashes against its presence in East Africa. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie fokus op geselekteerde narratiewe deur skrywers van Indiër-oorsprong wat tussen 1960 en 2010 in Suid-Afrika en Oos-Afrika ontstaan om uitbeeldings van migrerings en verskuiwings vanaf die einde van die 19e eeu, ná die vestiging van handelskapitalisme, immigrasie in die vroeë 21e eeu na die groot stede van Europa, die VS en Kanada, te ondersoek, met die oog op navorsing na die toename in globale migrasies. Die (post-)koloniale en imperial liggings wat in hierdie narratiewe oorvleuel, beam Vijay Mishra se lesing van diasporiese Indiese narratiewe as twee outonome argiewe wat deur die terme "ou" en "nuwe" diasporas aangedui word. Hierdie proefskrif bestudeer die manier waarop herinneringe benut word, nie alleen in die soeke na legitimisering en burgerskap nie, maar ook om tot 'n beter begrip te kom van die omstandighede wat Asiërs na die imperiale wêreldstede loods. Ek kategoriseer die twee narratiewe volgens die twee lokale en in die volgorde waarin hulle verskyn het en bestudeer Ansuyah R Singh se Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) en Bahadur Tejani se Day After Tomorrow (1971) as die eerste roman wat deur 'n Suid-Afrikaanse en 'n Oos-Afrikaanse skrywe van Indiese herkoms in Engels gepubliseer is, en die wyse waarop hulle onderskeidelik die kwessies van burgerskap en legitimisasie benader. In daaropvolgende verhale van Suid-Afrika, onderskei ek tussen narratiewe at hul onstaan in die apartheidsjare gehad het, naamlik The Hajji and Other Stories deur Ahmed Essop, Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) deur Agnes Sam en Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam deur K. Goonam; uit die post-apartheid era kom The Wedding (2001) deur Imraan Covadia en The Lotus People (2002) deur Aziz Hassim, asook Song of the Atman (2006) deur Ronnie Govender. Ek kyk hoe die verhale in die eerste kategorie spanning beskryf tussen die apartheidstaat — en die gevolglike anti-apartheidnasionalisme in 'n eenheidskeppende "swart" identiteit — om die aandag te vestig op die wyse waarop die tekste sowel apartheid- as anti-apartheid strategieë kompliseer deur tegelykertyd versoeningsmoontlikhede en verdeelheid uit te beeld. Post-apartheid verhale, daarenteen, loof eerder etniese selfbemagtiging met die klem op kulturele outentisiteit in reaksie op die post-apartheid bevordering van 'n "reënboognasie", as om 'n homogene "swartheid" voor te staan. Op dieselfde manier bestudeer ek die daaropvolgende Oos-Afrikaanse verhale onder twee kategorieë. In die eerste kategorie sluit ek In an Brown Mantle (1972) deur Peter Nazareth en The Gunny Sack (1989) deur M.G. Vassanjiin, as twee romans wat Asiërs se koloniale geskiedenis en hul toetrede tot die post-onafhanklikheid bedeling uitbeeld (verbeeld) (imagine), met die klem op die wyse waarop hierdie oorgang begrippe van samehorigheid kompliseer. In die tweede kategorie kyk ek na The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995) deur Jameela Siddiqi, No Place Like Home (1996) deur Yasmin Alibhai en Migritude (2010) deur Shaila Patel as voorbeelde van post-1990 verhale wat probleme met die politieke teenreaksies en verskuiwings van Asiër-onderdane vanuit Oos-Afrika na wêreldstede aanspreek. As deel van die erkenning van die totaliserende en onderdrukkende kapasiteit van kultuur, vra die drie skrywers – as Indiërs en as wêreldburgers – die diaspora om sy rol in die opstook van politieke teenreaksie teen sy teenwoordigheid in Oos-Afrika onder oënskou te neem.