Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future - (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future) by Isis Barra Costa

About the Book

Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future investigates the interlinked art, history, religion, philosophy, and cosmology of oral traditions across the Afro-Brazilian diaspora, arguing that these varied cultural expressions together constitute distinctive forms of knowledge.

Book Synopsis

Over the centuries, from the transatlantic slave trade to voluntary mass migrations through the digital era, African cultural practices have taken root and transformed in the Americas. Even though Afro-Brazilians make up a large share of the global Black diaspora, and Brazilian culture in turn has been deeply shaped by African influences, their particular contributions remain overlooked.

Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future investigates the interlinked art, history, religion, philosophy, and cosmology of oral traditions across the Afro-Brazilian diaspora, arguing that these varied cultural expressions together constitute distinctive forms of knowledge. Through case studies of sacred and secular performances, Isis Barra Costa shows how Afro-Brazilian concepts and practices preserve and renew an ever-changing diasporic philosophy. Ranging across parades of Black royal courts, Carnaval performing groups, oracular literature, "spirit-dictated" novels, and many other forms, she illuminates the survival and transformation of African cosmologies, epistemologies, and poetics in the Americas. Foregrounding oral narratives, Barra Costa sheds light on the nonhegemonic protagonists and canons of the Black Atlantic: the spaces and beings, kingdoms and heroes, philosophers and historians that orient Afro-Brazilian memory and imagination. By tracing forms of knowledge across the global African diaspora, this deeply interdisciplinary book reveals the transformative potential of Afro-Brazilian philosophical paradigms.

Review Quotes

Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis about Afro-Atlantic epistemologies, narration, and performance in Brazil--from Carnaval parades to spirit-led novels. Barra Costa writes with lyrical grace, using vivid metaphors and poetic language to explore their recreation and transformation across time, from the transatlantic slave trade to digital networks today.--Christopher J. Dunn, author of Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil

By studying the Kongo-Angola-Yoruba-Ewe-Brazilian archive with the same rigor usually devoted to the European archive, Barra Costa brilliantly shows how the most diverse African matrices do not dissolve into a single national culture and how they illuminate a world still haunted by colonialism.--Pedro Meira Monteiro, Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University

About the Author

Isis Barra Costa is assistant professor of contemporary Brazilian cultural and literary studies at the Ohio State University.