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Thesis Abstract
Drawing Down Ancestors: Defining the Afriscape Through Ground Markings and Street Altars
With the recent absurdly brutal killing of an unarmed Black man named Oscar Grant by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer in Oakland, the common occurrence of death by gun violence in Black communities has come to the forefront of national attention. This presentation will explore the manner in which Black people in these communities respond to these tragic events by creating altars to those who have been slain. These altars often include iconography and practices found within the practice of ancestor veneration of African Diasporic religions.
The Afri-Brazilian religion of Umbanda is one of the most prominent of these African Diasporic religions. In a “gira,” a ritual of the Umbanda religion, initiates under trance manifest a variety of African ancestral spirits known as “preto velhos” or old blacks, and create drawings on the ground that signal the presence of these spirits. A visual event, these drawings, or “pontos riscados,” are one of the many ways that the evolving ritual practice of ancestor veneration works to reclaim histories. The pontos riscados within this ritual practice delineate the presence of ancestral entities using a matrix of signs and ideograms influenced by African Kongo cosmology. In addition to explaining the meaning in some of the signs and symbols in pontos riscados, this presentation will explore the common denominators in the vernacular altars created on the streets of Oakland, the bottle trees of Mississippi, and the pontos riscados created in Rio de Janeiro.
By explaining the presence of Kongo symbols common in the spiritual practice of Black folks in a variety of locales, this presentation will map some of the ever-changing horizons of what I call the Afriscape. I focus on the presence of gun violence and the subsequent increase in the gun-related deaths of young black men. My presentation theorizes the role of secular ritual in the creation of urban street altars created as place of mourning. The intersection between creative expression and secular ritual provides the victims of traumatic experience in Black communities the opportunity to facilitate communal mourning, and healing. Agency is reclaimed in these representational spaces, which reveal important insights about African Diasporic identity.
Contact
ddeterville@mac.com
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