Africana Sacred Healing Arts

Monday, May 16, 2022

Afternoon:

• 1:00 – 1:30  | Arrival and Check-in
• 1:30 - 1:35 | Welcome Martin Jean, director of the ISM
• 1:35 – 3:05  | Art, Healing, Slavery (Dining Room)

Anna Arabindan-Kesson, “Bush Tea and Archived Bodies: Plantation Returns as Forms of Healing”

Stephen Hamilton, “Cloth, Medicine, and Material: Examining the History of Textile Arts and Sciences from Ancient Africa to The Americas”

Marcela Perdomo, “Repairing the Past through Spirit Possession among the Garifuna of Honduras”

Bernard Gordillo, chair

•  
• 3:00 – 3:30  | Coffee Break
• 3:30 – 4:30  | Pentecostal Healing and Digital Religion (Dining Room)
• Abimbola Adunni Adelakun, “Healed Through the Internet: Pentecostalism and Digital Miracles”
• Jesse Chevan, “’Daddy Bailey Was All In My Room’: The United House of Prayer, Media, and Rejecting the ‘Zoom Church’ ”
• Elizabeth McAlister, chair

4:30 – 5:30  | Opening Reception (Foyer/Patio)

Dinner on your own. There will be a reservation sign-up form to group conference attendees at downtown restaurants.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Morning:

9:00 – 10:00  | Continental Breakfast (Upper Lobby)

10:00 – 11:00 | Dialogic Keynote I: Stories, Rituals and Ancestors on the Path to Healing (Dining Room)

• Yvonne Chireau
• Paul Stoller
• Kyrah Malika Daniels, moderator

11:00 – 11:15 | Morning Break

11:15 – 12:45 | Mediating Pain: Sufism and Healing in North Africa (Amphitheatre)

• Tamara Turner, “Moving Towards Painful Feelings: Notions and Suffering and Healing in North African Popular Islam” 
• Samuel Llano, “Unruly Bodies: Curative Trance Dancing and Resistance in Colonial Morocco”
• Richard Jankowsky, Discussant
• Eben Graves, Chair

Afternoon:

12:45 – 1:45 | Lunch (Dining Room)

1:45 – 3:15  | Sacred Space & Ritual Music in Black Atlantic Healing (Amphitheatre) 

• Federica Toldo, “The Diacritical Role of Music and Dance Within an Angolan Ritual Healing System”
• Curtis Andrews, “Healing, Song, and Community Development at the Shrine of Torgbui Apetorku”
• Eric Galm, “A New Day Will Come: Intersections of Faith, Place, and Space in the Brazilian Congado Mineiro”
• Nia Campinha-Bacote, chair

3:15 – 3:45  | Coffee Break (Upper Lobby)

3:45 – 4:15  | Standalone Performance-Demonstration (Dining Room)

• Melanie R. Hill, “Prayer, Prophecy, and Praise: The Science of Music and the Making of Sacred Space”

4:15  | Dinner on your own. There will be a reservation sign-up form to group conference attendees at downtown restaurants.

Wednesday, May 18

Morning:

9:00 – 10:00  | Continental Breakfast (Upper Lobby)

10:00 – 11:00 | Dialogic Keynote II: Healing Senses: Arts of the Afterlife (Dining Room)

• Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz
• Braxton Shelley
• Kyrah Malika Daniels, chair

11:00 – 11:15 | Morning Break

11:15 – 12:45 | Death as Initiation: Funerals, Healing, and Expressive Culture (Amphitheatre)

• Kyle Brooks, “It’s a Homegoing, Not a Funeral” – The Sermonic Selection and Transcendent Possibility”
• John Dankwa, “Mourning the Dead, Healing the Living: Gyil Music in Funeral Ceremonies of the Dagara in Northwestern Ghana”
• Nia Campinha-Bacote, “Sonic Medicine: Healing in the Midst of Death and Dying”
• Heba Abdelfattah, chair

Afternoon:

12:45​ – 1:45 | Lunch (Dining Room)

1:45 – 3:45  | Divine Sounds & Sacred Movements: The Healing Power of Words, Breath, and Dance in Spiritual Baptist and Kumina (Amphitheatre)

Panel abstract

• John Hunte, “When Doption Becomes Language and Makes Roads” (Zoom)
• Ireka Jelani, “Activating the Healing Powers of Herbs: Divine Sounds and Incantations” (Zoom)
• Yanique Hume (chair), “Sensing Presence: Kumina and the Embodiment of Ancestral Wisdom”
• Nyasha Laing, “Spirit Nation: Revitalizing Kumina Expressions”

3:45 – 4:00  | Coffee Break (Upper Lobby)

4:00 –5:00 | Concluding Discussions (Amphitheatre)

Dinner on your own. There will be a reservation sign-up form to group conference attendees at downtown restaurants.

Departures

Bio 

Yvonne Chireau is professor in the department of religion at Swarthmore College, where she teaches courses on theories of religion, Africana religions, and American religious history. She is the author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (2003) and the co-editor of Black Zion: African American Religions and Judaism (1999). Her varied thoughts on the historical intersections between magic, Africana religions, comics, and popular culture tropes of black spirituality can be found at the research blog The Academic Hoodoo. She is currently co-producing a documentary film about contemporary reclamations of the African American ancestral traditions known as Conjure, Hoodoo, and Rootworking by millennial practitioners, artists, educators, and entrepreneurs.

Bio 

Tanner-Opperman Chair of African Art History in Honor of Roy Sieber
Indiana University

Martinez-Ruiz earned his B.A from the University of Havana in 1994 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2004. He is an Art Historian with expertise in African and Caribbean artistic, visual and religious practices, whose work challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries and examines the varied understandings of – and engagement with – ‘art’ and ‘visual culture’.

Following professorships at Havana’s High Institute of Art from 1993-1997, the Rhode Island School of Design from 2002-2004 and Stanford University from 2004-2013, Martinez-Ruiz joined the University of Cape Town, where he has served as the head of the Art History and Discourse of Art Department since 2013. He was the 2017-2018 recipient of the Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, hosted by Oxford’s School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and a Senior Fellow at St Anthony’s College and Trinity College.

His books include Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign, Temple University Press, 2013 (English) and El Colegio de México, 2012 (Spanish); Faisal Abdu’Allah: On the Art of Dislocation, Atlantic Center of Modern Art Press, 2012 and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds, Yale University Press, 2007, for which he received the College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Award. Other recent publications include Ma kisi Nsi: L’art de habitants de region de Mbanza Kongo, in Angola figures de pouvoir (Paris: Dapper Museum Press, 2010); Writing Bodies in the Bakongo Atlantic Experience, in Performances: Challenges for Art and Anthropology (Quai Branly Museum Press, 2010); Funerary Pots of the Kongo in Central Africa, in African Terra Cotta: A Millenary Heritage (Geneva: Musee Barbier Mueller Press, 2008), The Impossible Reflection: A New Approach to African Themes in Wifredo Lam’s Art, in Wifredo Lam (Miami: Perez Art Museum Press, 2008).

He is currently working on Unwrapping the Universe: Art and Cosmology Among the Bakongo, a project that takes the Kongo concept of the universe as a packet or bundle and aims to “unwrap” the conceptual layers of specific works of art to gain a better understanding of their cosmological complexities and interrelated meanings and to describe the conceptual and functional associations of these objects within their cultural context.  Art forms explored include figurative sculpture, masks, divination implements, basketry, textiles, and ceramics and the book will disentangle the cross-cultural relationships these pieces both express and create while also tracing their historical evolution and present-day usage. 

In addition to his research and teaching, Martinez-Ruiz is an active curator, whose shows have explored issues of visual communication, dislocation and hybridity in the work of contemporary artists across the African diaspora. He also serves as an editor for the Cuban Studies Magazine and Harvard’s Transition Magazine and was a researcher for Pacific Standard Time AL at the Getty Foundation and the Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles California from 2014  to 2016.

Bio 

Braxton D. Shelley, associate professor of music, of sacred music, and divinity, came to Yale to teach, to continue his path-breaking work as a theorist of African American sacred music, and to serve as faculty director of the new Interdisciplinary Program in Music and the Black Church housed in the ISM. He is a scholar, an ordained minister, and an experienced church musician.

A native of North Carolina, Prof. Shelley graduated with highest distinction from Duke University where he majored in music and minored in history. He then entered the Ph.D. program in the history and theory of music at the University of Chicago. While finishing his Ph.D., he also earned a Master of Divinity degree at the University of Chicago Divinity School, upon which he was ordained in the Missionary Baptist church. In 2017, he was appointed assistant professor of music at Harvard University, where he  taught until accepting the Yale appointment.

Prof. Shelley is one of the most celebrated musicologists of his generation and on his way to be one of the most celebrated in any generation. He was awarded the Paul A. Pisk Prize in 2016 by the American Musicological Society (AMS) for the best paper by a graduate student. In 2018, he won the Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Chicago’s Division of the Humanities. His field-changing article “Analyzing Gospel,” which appeared in the Journal of the AMS, was awarded prizes from all three major American professional societies for music studies: the Einstein Award from the AMS, the Kunst Prize from the Society of Ethnomusicology, and the Adam Krims Award from the Popular Music Interest Group of the Society of Music Theory.

Prof. Shelley’s first book, Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination, was published this year by Oxford University Press and was hailed by Prof. Cornel West as “the best book written on Gospel Music.”

A second book, under contract with the University of California Press, is entitled An Eternal Pitch: Bishop G.E. Patterson and the Afterlives of Ecstasy. It analyzes the great preacher’s musical style, his use of radio and other media, and the digital reverberation of his ministry after his death in 2007.

Prof. Shelley already has nearly a dozen articles and book chapters in press or published. He is also a frequent guest lecturer and clinician.

Bio 

Paul Stoller is professor of anthropology at West Chester University. He has published fifteen books, including ethnographies, biographies, memoirs, and novels, and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2013, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden presented him the Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology.  In 2015, the American Anthropological Association awarded him the Anthropology in Media Award.  His forthcoming book, Wisdom from the Edge of the Village: Writing Ethnography in Troubled Times will be published in early 2023. 

Bio 

Richard Jankowsky, Ph.D., received his B.A. in anthropology and music from Tufts University and his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago. Prior to his appointment to the department of music at Tufts University in 2006, he was on the faculty of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, England. Through fieldwork-based methods, Professor Jankowsky’s primary area of research revolves around the intersection of music, ritual, and power in North Africa, particularly music’s capacity to heal, to maintain and narrate histories of underrepresented populations, to create conditions for transcendent experiences, and to serve as a flashpoint for debates over cultural, religious, and political identities. His music analytical work explores issues of cyclicity, density, and transformation in contemporary trance rituals. His most recent book, Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form, features a companion web site developed in conjunction with Tufts Digital Library. His previous book Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia, received three honorable mention awards for book prizes from academic societies in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and North African Studies. He is a two-time National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and has also received grants from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Fulbright.

Healed through the Internet: Pentecostalism and Digital Miracles

Abstract: This presentation studies mediated worship as necessitated by the COVID-19 global pandemic: miracle healing through electronic technology, plus how the spectacular configuration of the media was innovatively deployed to facilitate e-healings. From the year 2020 to some months in 2021 while the pandemic raged, Pentecostal churches in parts of Nigeria were locked down alongside other public spaces. Churches that premised healing miracles, especially, soon encountered the opportunities and limitations of worshipping through their digital devices. Factors such as a sense of intimacy, social connections, and empowerment that congregants foster when they physically gather to worship in churches, enabling the possible performance of miracles, were not so easily replicable through personal mobile devices. However, internet technology’s collapse of space and time, the ubiquity of digital devices, the interactive quality of social media, and the circumstances of a global pandemic that forced many public places to a state of lockdown even as it depressed many people’s economic capabilities, all came together to press the creative instinct in religious leaders who needed to keep church going. The computer and several digital devices played an essential role in forging the miraculousness of the miracles that some pastors staged at this time. They astutely used the new media and digital devices to perform miracles, making it blend into the existing systems of social relations such that the miracles seemed more continuous with social life rather than an irruption of it.

Bio:

Abimbola A. Adelakun is an assistant professor in the African/African Diaspora Department, the University of Texas at Austin. She studies modern African culture through the disciplinary perspectives of performance, gender, Africana, and Yoruba studies. Her research interests span the areas of theatre and performance, Pentecostalism and pentecostal culture, indigenous African religions, religious creativity, Yoruba studies, and black popular culture. Her coming book, Performing Power in Nigeria: Politics, Identity, and Pentecostalism, is being published by Cambridge University Press.

Healing, Song, and Community Development at the Shrine of Torgbui Apetorku

Abstract: In a remote corner of southeastern Ghana one encounters the shrine of Torgbui Apetorku, a relatively unknown yet significant vodu/spirit found among Ewe-speaking people. Like many who follow indigenous spiritual practices/dekornusubor, adherents appeal to Apetorku for spiritual protection, increased prosperity, success in endeavours, removal of obstacles and healing. From its initial entry into the Ghanaian “vodusphere” till present, Apetorku’s identity has been primarily associated with healing and protection both of which are themselves intertwined and operate within the psycho-somatic-metaphysical reality that dekornusubor engenders. As such, the notion of healing of the sick is approached from a holistic position that includes divination (to determine a cause), initiation (to enjoin the patient spiritually with the deity), and treatment (which encompasses medicinal, artistic, and psychological processes). The aim of this presentation is two-fold: 1) to highlight the role that music (and especially song text) plays in the healing processes in this shrine and 2) to situate the shrine’s effects and impact on the larger social development of the community and its active engagement in combining indigenous healing modalities with Western-derived scientific approaches. In doing so, one can see conscious efforts by the leaders of this shrine that successfully prove that indigenous beliefs and practices have a practical, efficacious, and relevant place in modern Ghana, despite postcolonial attitudes that espouse otherwise.

Bio:

Curtis Andrews is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta. He has spent the last 20+ years engaging with Ewe communities in southeastern Ghana, exploring the nexus between drum, dance, song, and spirituality. His activities are collaborative in nature and he as worked with community leaders to implement development projects that focus upon education, health, and cultural transmission. In addition to academic pursuits, Andrews is an award-winning composer/performer/percussionist and leads his own “world jazz” ensemble and regularly collaborates with musicians from varied musical cultures for recordings, performances, and tours across Canada. He recently released his second critically-acclaimed album of original music.

Bush Tea and Archived Bodies: Plantation Returns as Forms of Healing

Abstract: The plantation as we often ‘see’ it in our minds, comes into view through the lenses of art and medicine. On the one hand, the plantation was imaged, and imagined, through the conventions of landscape representation. It provided artists with opportunities for observation while also presenting challenges for the organization of vision. On the other hand, it was also a site of scientific importance especially to physicians who traveled there to observe, assess, and diagnose unfamiliar signs, symptoms, and conditions. 1  In different ways it became a space for experimentation, both artistic and scientific, that often supported the economic goals of the plantation industrial complex. The shared reliance on visual acuity, or clarity, by both artists and doctors is mirrored in the plantation itself which was a cleared space organized around structures of surveillance and oversight. In turn these lines of sight often sustained the visual representation of the plantation landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s idea of “plantation futures,” we need to consider the ongoing effect of these historical plantation imaginings. Their organization of vision and, management of people, continue to frame experiences, and practices, of healthcare in Black and Brown communities (communities whose lives have been marked by the trauma of unfree labor). However, the lines of sight and the forms of violence they shape is never the whole story. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s notion of the plot – a site where enslaved communities created, and drew on, practices of knowledge-sharing that relied on sustenance – I center the work of several contemporary artists who have returned to the site of the plantation, specifically the sites of formerly enslaved communities, as the ground for their artistic practice. This paper will consider the contemporary work of Annalee Davis (Barbados), Andrea Chung (Jamaica) and Jasmine Togo-Brisby (Queensland), alongside historical imagery and descriptions of enslaved communities. It considers the forms of their return, to the plantation, and describes the practices of restoration, restitution and healing they articulate, drawn from the communities of enslaved people they center, through their artistic production. Their work, in confronting the violence of these histories, is a form of curating/caring for the past, and the lives we can no longer see. By directly addressing the impact of these histories on our lives now, through an engagement with familial histories, these artists also compel us to see how writing (art) history and ‘doing’ health-work are intertwined. Their work shows us that the radical practices of care forged within Black, and Brown, diasporic communities are the means for reorientating our conceptions of health, healing, and medicine itself.

1. Ruha Benjamin, ed., “Naturalizing Coercion: The Tuskegee Experiments and the Laboratory Life of the Plantation,” in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 25–49; Britt Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2017).

Bio:

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an assistant professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the departments of African American studies and art and archaeology at Princeton University. Born in Sri Lanka, she completed undergraduate degrees in New Zealand and Australia and worked as a registered nurse before completing her Ph.D. in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Anna focuses on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, medicine, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. Her first book, published with Duke University Press, is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World and she is also the director of the digital humanities project Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism. She is at work on a second book called An Empire State of Mind: Plantation Imaginaries and British Colonialism.

“It’s a Homegoing, Not a Funeral” – The Sermonic Selection and Transcendent Possibility

Abstract: In Black church traditions, the climactic preaching moment is frequently preceded by gospel musical selections that invite a shift in affective disposition and congregational receptivity to the anticipated word. Such selections, known as sermonic selections, often serve to heighten emotional sensitivity and prepare the hearts and minds of listeners for ready communication. In the preface to his text Healing for the Soul, Braxton Shelley argues that gospel music accrues a spiritual force through the reiterative intensity of the musical cycle known as the vamp. The vamp, he asserts “organizes expressive activity around a moment of transcendence” (vii-viii). I assert that the telos of this transcendent possibility is profoundly influenced by the specificity of the liturgical context. Following this, I want to argue for the therapeutic functions of the vamp in the context of funeral rites, utilizing recorded examples as case studies of this experience. This paper will explore the function of the common black church liturgical feature, the sermonic selection, in the context of funeral rites, arguing for its utility as a facilitator of spiritual transcendence and collective healing. The liturgical construction of black church funeral services presents an apparatus for holding together the contradictions of death as both a severance of natural life and a liberating return to the sacred cosmos. The rhetorical framing of funerals as homegoings and celebrations of life reflects a sense of that complexity. As well, funerals in the black church traditions frequently serve as de facto reunions, as sites of remembrance and re-membering of familial ties. In this way, the funeral liturgy becomes a locus for healing reconnection. Thus, I assert that when employed as an aspect of the funeral liturgy, the sermonic selection operates as a therapeutic musical assembly of language, gesture, and sonic material.

Bio 

Kyle Brooks, Ph.D., a native of Detroit, MI, is assistant professor of homiletics, worship, and Black church & African diaspora studies at Methodist Theological School in Ohio. He completed his B.A., M.A., and M.Div. degrees at Yale University, and he completed his Ph.D. in Religion at Vanderbilt University. His upcoming book project develops a philosophical framework and typology of the popular cultural tendency towards sacralizing black male clerical leadership in historical and contemporary black sociopolitical movements. His research interests include black religious cultures, public theology, religious dimensions of political culture, black ritual & performance studies, and the intersections of religion, rhetoric, & communication. His work has been published in various print and digital venues, including the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion, Fire! The Multimedia Journal for Black Studies, and the Political Theology Network.

Sonic Medicine: Healing in the Midst of Death and Dying

Abstract: The majority of current scholarship documents musical practices of the African diaspora post-death (such as New Orleans’ jazz funerals and the professionalization of wailers and mourners in African and African-American communities), however, very little has been written regarding music played or sung in the interstitial space between life and death, right before an individual passes on. In this presentation, I will share my findings from two years worth of interviews with death doulas, ethnomusicologists, family members, and healthcare professionals of African ancestry, revealing the dynamic ways in which music and sound have the capacity to facilitate healing, even in the midst of death and dying.

Bio 

Nia Campinha-Bacote received her Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School as well as certification from Yale Institute of Sacred Music for her work in the field of music thanatology, in which she collaboratively worked to produce a sonic healing album melding the melodies and instrumentation of Afro-diasporic musicians with nature (Gileadalbum.com). Resting on the power of embodied epistemologies, Nia’s research incorporates literature and film reviews alongside interviews with African-American death doulas, ethnomusicologists, colleagues, and family members as she investigates music’s ability to facilitate health and healing within the African-American community. Nia also holds a bachelor’s in health and human biology from Brown University as well as certifications as a somatic-trauma informed yoga instructor and Emotional Emancipation Circle facilitator, holding space for evidence-informed, psychologically sound, culturally grounded, and community-defined self-help support groups for people of African ancestry.

“Daddy Bailey Was All in My Room”: The United House of Prayer, Media, and Rejecting the “Zoom Church”

Abstract:

In the pandemic spring of 2020, restrictions on gathering compelled many religious communities to explore virtual platforms for technologically-mediated worship. Meanwhile, the United House of Prayer for all People (UHOP) decided not to live-stream their services, opting instead to suspend worship until restrictions were lifted. For many members of this predominantly African American Christian sect, it would be months before they were able to worship with others. Yet the suspension of services did not mean the suspension of members’ entire spiritual lives: they turned, instead, to a range of official UHOP products, including DVDs of past services, audio CDs of the organization’s unique shout band music, periodicals, and a range of blessed household products for the comfort and healing of the Holy Spirit. Issues of Bailey Magazine, the quarterly named for the sect’s current leader, Daddy Bailey, continue to brim with written testimonies to the healing capacities of these products. Some members even testify that listening to their own cell phone recordings of House of Prayer trombones bands expedited their recovery from COVID-19.

In this paper, I ask why the UHOP rejects a widely-embraced form of technological mediation – live-streamed religious services – while simultaneously and vigorously taking up other forms of mediation. Drawing on fieldwork at a House of Prayer in Harlem, NY and conversing with literature on technological mediation and Black Atlantic religion (Beliso-de Jesus 2015, Jackson 2013, Rouse et al 2016, etc.), I argue that distinctions between “liveness” and “mediation” are contingent and nested within particular “semiotic ideologies” (Keane 2007, 2018) and “sensational forms” (Meyer 2015). By attending broadly to the material repertoires through which UHOP members have long encountered spiritual forces and found healing, we may begin to understand why they rejected the “Zoom Church.”

Bio:

Jesse Chevan is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University researching topics in African American religious music. His dissertation fieldwork focuses on the trombone shout band tradition of the United House of Prayer for All People; in particular, the ways in which supra-linguistic sound facilitates direct encounters with the Holy Spirit. At the heart of this work is the intertwining of human and instrumental voices as worshippers distinguish the sacred and profane in sound. Jesse has also worked as a professional drummer and percussionist on the NYC music scene, performing a range of musics including New Orleans brass band, afrobeat, jazz, hip hop, and klezmer. At Columbia, Jesse has taught several semesters of Asian Music Humanities and is currently a Core Preceptor for Contemporary Civilization.

Mourning the Dead, Healing the Living: Gyil Music in Funeral Ceremonies of the Dagara in Northwestern Ghana

Abstract:

In Dagara society of northwestern Ghana funerals are significant social events. The occasion offers families the platform to mourn their deceased member in accordance with Dagara traditional, religious, and cultural practices. Significant in the organization and performance of the funeral is the gyil, a wooden framed pentatonic xylophone. Gyil music is the vehicle that drives the symbolic acts that validates the funeral as a public event. The genre performed for the funeral is called kuurbine, an instrumental music accompanied with dirges. Without kuurbine music, the Dagara would say “there is no funeral, no grief, and no death.” For the Dagara, the value of kuurbine music lies in its ability to stimulate weeping, an essential requirement for all funeral attendants. Not only does weeping constitutes a communal endorsement of the deceased person but also facilitates the transition of the soul to the world of the ancestors. Drawing on participant observation of Dagara funerals in northwestern Ghana, this paper examines kuurbine music as a meaningful aspect of Dagara funeral ceremonies. It explores how kuurbine music, beyond the normative role of accompanying funeral proceedings, enables the community to express grief by weeping. The paper argues that weeping in Dagara funerals is the most significant means through which loss is tamed and assimilated into a form with which one can live. Unexpressed emotions over death, the Dagara maintain, is dangerous to the health of the individual, therefore, the use of kuurbine music to “crack open that part of the self that holds grieve under control.” Stimulating people to unleash their feelings towards death, the music ensures a systematic and positive adjustment to human loss. In that regard, kuurbine music is considered a healing mechanism and a crucial means of managing bereavement in Dagara society.

Bio:

John Dankwa is an assistant professor of music at Wesleyan University, Middletown. He is an ethnomusicologist and performer who specializes in African music. His performance area ranges from West African traditional drumming to African pop and art music. Dankwa’s current research focuses on Dagara xylophone music tradition in northwestern Ghana. His book-in-progress, When the Gyil Speaks, is a study of meaning in Dagara xylophone music. Based on extensive fieldwork in the Nandom Traditional Area in northwestern Ghana, Dankwa’s work examines how a single instrument and the music it performs can be invested with so much meaning in the cultural matrix within which it operates. Currently, John Dankwa is the director of the West African Drumming and African Pop Music ensembles at Wesleyan. He is also the music director of the Association of Ghana Methodist Church Choirs, North American Mission Diocese (USA and Canada).

A New Day Will Come: Intersections of Faith, Place, and Space in the Brazilian Congado Mineiro

Abstract:  Music plays an active role in connecting the history, culture, and spirituality of Africans in the Americas.  For hundreds of years, the Congado  (an Afro-Brazilian religious drumming and singing procession, coronation ceremony, and Catholic Mass) has been present throughout Brazil and continues to be a vibrant manifestation today. I consider how the Congado Mineiro (from Minas Gerais) intertwines African-descended beliefs with Catholicism to preserve and remember lived and imagined reflections of the past, while projecting a brighter future.  In addition to focusing on this musical tradition within a historical perspective, I examine how it is interpreted by multi-generational neighborhood groups as well as more recent youth social service projects within a single Brazilian city. Both distinct perspectives share a protective space and sense of community emerging directly from the music, whether in a church, on the street, or at a formal performance venue.

The Associação das Guardas do Congado  (Association of the Congado Guards), from the city of Itabira, Minas Gerais, consists of approximately 300 individuals who comprise 11 neighborhood groups.  I contrast this with the Meninos de Minas (Youth from Minas) from the same city, which has adapted these drumming rhythms for use in regional popular music arrangements but has not adhered to the religious or cultural aspects of the greater tradition.  Intersections between geographical boundaries (Portugal, Africa, Brazil, and the United States) and religious belief systems were highlighted at a Missa Conga  (Congado Mass) held at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in April 2018. This event was officiated by a Catholic priest originally from Angola, bringing another level of discussion and interpretation of this unique intersection of Portuguese, African, and Catholic Diasporas.  This presentation includes musical, rhythmic, and video examples as well as a discussion of equity and access to religious institutions by practitioners from marginalized and disenfranchised communities.

Bio:

Eric Galm is professor of music, co-director of the Center for Caribbean Studies, and music department chair at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. He founded the Trinity Samba Ensemble and the Samba Fest, a music festival featuring the United States debut performances of several Brazilian artists. He has conducted research, presented and performed in Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, the United States and Canada. His book The Berimbau: Soul of Brazilian Music (Mississippi 2010) is the first academic study of the Brazilian musical bow. In September 2018, he was awarded Honorary Citizenship from the City of Itabira, Minas Gerais, Brazil after he helped produce perhaps the first Missa Conga drumming mass in the United States. Additional awards include a Fulbright Fellowship, Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation grant, Trinity College (Trustee Award for Excellence and Hughes Teaching Achievement), and Hartford-based SINA Steve Balcanoff Award for “significant contributions to the betterment of the community.”

Cloth, Medicine, and Material: Examining the History of Textile Arts and Sciences from Ancient Africa to the Americas

Abstract: The emergence of cloth culture and its deep affiliations with medicine, ritual, and ceremony is a crucial part of Africa’s history. This presentation explores the early origins of weaving and affiliated textile arts from the Bight of Benin to the Congo basin. It will also examine the relationship between textile arts and sciences, other forms of fibercraft, and material culture, as well as medicine. Handmade textiles and their affiliated arts played essential roles in early African history. They would continue to have significant commercial and ceremonial value in the Americas during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, The ritual and medicinal properties associated with the dyes and fibers used in their manufacture would undergo dynamic syncretic transformations in the African Diaspora. This presentation illuminates the complex histories of these transformations while establishing their origins deep in African history.

Bio:

Stephen Hamilton is a mixed-media artist, researcher, and arts educator living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. He is currently a first year Ph.D. Student in Harvard’s AAAS (African And African American Studies) Department. His research focuses on the indigenous textile industries of southern Nigeria. Hamilton has been an exhibiting artist for the past ten years. These include solo and collaborative exhibitions at the Medicine Wheel Spoke Gallery, Boston MA, (2020) and the Museum of the National Center for African American Artists, Boston MA (2016). Hamilton has worked on temporary site-specific large-scale mixed media textile and sculpture installations for the past four years. These include “The Founder’s Project,” previously located at the Bruce C. Bolling building in Boston MA (2018-2019), and “Stitched Into Memory,” previously located at Atlantic Wharf, also in Boston MA (2017). Hamilton has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.

Prayer, Prophecy, and Praise: The Science of Music and the Making of Sacred Space

Abstract: In Black Performance Theory, Dr. D. Soyini Madison’s foreword explicates the imperatives and aesthetics of Black expressive culture and the ways in which Blackness is performatively examined in time and space. This scholarship emphasizes performance, performativity, and the performative as significant terms that develop a greater theoretical paradigm of Black performance. Madison defines performance as the actual event or “cultural staging”: It is the song that is sung, the book that is written, and the poem that is dramatically performed. The performativity is defined as the marker of identity — in other words, how a song is sung, the style in which a book is written, and the poetics of fluid verses. The performative is the tangible historical or cultural difference that results from the union of both performance and performativity. In Scripture, the relationship between sacred music and healing are illustrated efficaciously: 1 Samuel 16:14 - 23 narrates David playing his lyre before Saul, aiding Saul’s healing from the evil spirit that tormented him. Prayer, Prophecy, and Praise is a three - part sacred music presentation, examining how Gospel music scientifically heals, and spiritually moves the psyche, body, and spirit. This paper/presentation/and artistic performance is more of an alternative and potentially longer format, amalgamating music performance, and the relationship between healing, religion, and the sciences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, how has sacred music helped heal the psyche and spirits of  pastors and laity? What are the ways in which stringed instruments, particularly the violin, transform and heal the body, materially and immaterially? This presentation evinces the scientific efficacy of stringed instruments in both natural and supernatural realms.

Bio:

Melanie R. Hill received her Ph.D. in English literature with concentrations in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hill is assistant professor of American Literature at Rutgers University, Newark. She has published articles on black feminism/womanism and the art of the sermon in African American literature. Dr. Hill is also a Gospel soul violinist who has performed at the White House on two occasions under the Obama administration, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Apollo Theater in New York, the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and for Pope Francis’s Papal Mass during his historic visit to the United States. She’s also been featured on Showtime at the Apollo, Good Day Philadelphia, BET, and has performed for Senator Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, Mrs. Susan L. Taylor, and opened for John Legend.

Sensing Presence: Kumina and the Embodiment of Ancestral Wisdom

Abstract: For the many who trod Rastafari as a Livity or as a lifeway and consciousness, the greatest affliction facing exiled Africans or those Afro-Saxons who inhabit the physical space of Babylon or the West is their alienation from their true divine selves. A self that stands firmly in counter-distinction to a persistent coloniality that shapes the quotidian experience of living in the contemporary Caribbean and broader African diaspora. For Rastafari, living from the Spirit is an ontological path that defies the ideological containment of European scientific rationality and the politicized ideology of language, power, and control. With the advent of enslavement in the Anglophone Caribbean, the Spirit-centred belief systems from Africa underwent significant challenges as Africans confronted the hierarchical monotheistic tradition of Imperial /European Christianity. In the absence of a pantheon of Gods and having a consistent space and community to observe and pay reverence to ancestral kin, new systems of thought and rituals of remembrance emerged building on the Abrahamic-Judeo-Christian sacred lineages to form new hybrid traditions. The radical philosophical social movement and sacred practice of Rastafari necessitated a reinterpretation of not only the God-head and Divine Universe but the “Word” itself. Words that in one context were used to oppress were thus reconfigured to challenge downpression and by extension assert a liberatory ethos. In this paper I examine how the voice and specifically the word sound became spiritually inscribed to mobilize and connect with the spiritual world and the divinity within. I engage this question of word sound as a specific type of spiritual labor that is not solely embedded in the inversion or creation of new words but also through sounds and the power it emits. I argue that this becomes most evident through a variety of performative means such as the song/chants in reggae music and the drum rhythms of nyabinghi ceremonial groundations.

Bio

Yanique Hume is an interdisciplinary scholar, priestess, dancer, and choreographer who specializes in the religious and performance cultures of the Caribbean and the broader African diaspora. She is head of the department of cultural studies at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Dr. Hume is the co-editor of Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora (2013); Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics, and Performance (2016); and Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean (2018). She has also conducted substantial research on the festive and sacred arts of the African diaspora. As a dancer and choreographer, Dr. Hume has worked with companies in her native Jamaica as well as Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. She is the recipient of grants from the Social Science Research Council, the International Development Research Centre, Ford Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

When Doption Becomes Language and Makes Road

Abstract: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” - (John 1:1, KJV)

Spiritual Baptist services are oftentimes long because they do not rigidly follow prescribed formats. It is ritual masking as ceremony. At any juncture, a song or sankey is pitched and, once a connection to the spirit world is established, road opens up for the indwelling, manifestation and transmission of the spirit. In these moments a song signals the opening of portals of mystical healing, of divine messages. The song becomes a symphony, its sonic disruption broadens, develops, and then transfers to bring an embodied rhythmic action called “the spirit of a doption”. Here, a road to the spirit world is created and we “Spiritual Baptists” journey in the spirit. Doption becomes an important mechanism for spirit to come in and for devotees to launch out, to travel to specific locations in the spirit world, to commune and communicate with the divine, and then return to present time, often for the service to resume and continue to the next item in the program. In this paper, I attempt to create an embodied visceral narrative for those of us devoted to Spiritual Baptist worship. Here the singing, rhythmic breathing, aspirating bodies are co-opted to fortify high energy portals between worlds. In this moment, literally, metaphorically, and symbolically, “the Word [is] made flesh, and dwells among us and we behold [its] glory… full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 KJV).  With this mapping, I hope to make tangible what is very much a lived experience for Spiritual Baptist practitioners. Hopefully, in trying to do so, I clarify (and complicate) some of the previous documents written about us, who we are and what we do.

Bio

John Hunte is a performing arts practitioner, activist, and teacher, armed with a diploma in dance theatre and production from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica, a B.S. in dance from State University of New York – College at Brockport, an M.F.A. in performing arts management from City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and a Ph.D. degree in cultural studies from the University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill Campus. Hunte serves as executive director with Barbados Dance Project Inc., an ongoing program for budding dancers to educate, collaborate and engage the Barbadian community. He serves as artistic director/principal at the Barbados Dance Theatre Company Inc. He sits on the Barbados Landship Association Advisory Committee. Hunte is an ordained minister in the Caribbean Regional Spiritual Baptist Community and currently serves as chair of the council of Spiritual Baptist Churches of Barbados. 

Activating the Healing Powers of Herbs: Divine Sounds and Incantations

Abstract:

The paper analyzes how the healing powers of plants and herbs can be activated through divine sounds and incantations. The narratives discuss the power, effects, and values of different types of prayers, words, songs, doption, chants, and other divine utterances, when spiritual and ritual healing is being conducted at Spiritual Baptist ceremonies and other events. When using plants and herbs in spiritual and ritual healing practices, divine sounds and incantations are powerful tools and techniques used by Spiritual Baptist to help invoke and activate the life source. The interchanging paradigms of sounds, rhythms and vibrations emanating from humans and plants are fascinating deep-rooted features in the spiritual and ritual performances of Spiritual Baptists and other Creole religions in Barbados and other eastern and southern Caribbean countries. In addition to the bell, drum, and other musical devices, the body is a useful percussive instrument that creates sounds and rhythmic patterns which helps to balance, build, and lift the energies of healing, when the methods of gathering, preparation, treatment, and other procedures are being applied. Stemming from the colonial slavery experiences, the beliefs, philosophies, and phenomenology surrounding the values and effects of sounds and incantations when using plants and herbs in spiritual and ritual healing practices, contains cross-cultural influences and syncretic blends of integration, adaptations, innovations, and improvisations, that are uniquely Caribbean. As a scholar-practitioner and an elder Queen-Mother in the faith, I reflect on my own practice in relationship to many other healers and devotees of Spiritual Baptist. In centering the plants as a key locus for studying how we use divine utterances; I wish to show the means through which divine wisdom functions as an integrative divine science bring spiritual energies to activate the innate medicinal potency of plants.

Bio

Ireka Jelani is a cultural practitioner whose involvement, experience and expertise in the arts and crafts sector spans over forty years. She specializes in basketry but explores organic sculptures, painting and print making. Over the years she has worked independently with community, educational and governmental organizations as a coordinator, promotor, teacher and consultant for tutorials, art and craft markets, exhibitions, and various cultural and spiritual events. Ireka studied various aspects of visual arts and craft at the College of Art, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. Some of her fine crafts include an array of “Royal Vessels” (artistic baskets) that have won awards numerous awards. Currently pursuing her Ph.D. through the department of cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, she is an ordained Reverend Mother Superior at the Triune Shouters Spiritual Baptist Church in Barbados.

Spirit Nation: Revitalizing Kumina Expressions

Abstract: Kumina is a spiritual practice that originated among Kikongo-speaking Central African contract laborers. It was brought to Jamaica in a post-emancipation period marked by the evolution of competing spiritual worldviews. For the Africans and their descendants, family lineage served as the primary access point to their cultural inheritance. Given the role of familial lineage in the transmission of ancestral knowledge among kumina followers, the practice has been vulnerable to language loss, cultural diffusion and taboos. Moreover the influence of kumina “queens” like the late Imogene Kennedy — known for popular bands and healing gifts — is waning. Yet despite decades of loss, contemporary interpretations of kumina continue to engage with notions of ancestral recognition and possession. They have evolved creative reimaginings of ritual (like dancing with a glass of water reverently and playfully balanced upon the head) and embraced expressions of kumina even outside of its customary contexts. Navigating ancestral presence, participants as well as artists build embodied resilience through heightened perception, rhythmic hypnosis, ecstatic release, the appropriation of religious song and ultimately spirit possession.  Thus across the contemporary cultural contexts in which it is performed, kumina has maintained an important spiritual function that holds great potential for community regeneration and nation building.  (See Dianne Stewart 2021; Maureen Warner-Lewis 1977; Monica Schuler 1980; Kenneth Bilby and Fu-Kiau 1983.)

Bio 

Nyasha Laing is a documentarian, writer and lawyer focused on the stories of leaders, cultures, and global communities. Her independent storytelling has been featured in and on international festivals, broadcasts and digital publications. She has served as an impact producer for award-winning PBS films including All Kinfolk Ain’t Skinfolk (2018) and Belly of the Beast (2020) as well as campaigner and consultant to non-governmental and inter-governmental institutions in the U.S., Caribbean and Africa. Nyasha is a graduate of Yale University and New York University School of Law. 

Unruly Bodies: Curative Trance Dancing and Resistance in Colonial Morocco

Abstract: Curative trance dancing plays a key role in community building and healing among Morocco’s Sufi brotherhoods (turuq). This type of dance has been the object of increasing scholarly attention over the last decades (Witulski, Kapchan, Becker). This ethnography has enriched our understanding of the sessions at which these dances are performed (lailat), and the meaning of trance in this context. It has also shed light on the path towards emancipation and international recognition that this dance has opened in front of certain minorities in Morocco, such as the Imazighen and Gnaoua. The organisation of festivals, such as the Gnaoua World Music Festival, celebrated annually at Essaouira, has aided in this process, insofar as it has provided members of this minority with a platform to construct and negotiate their own identity.

Personal narrative:  I am a cultural historian of music and a senior lecturer in Spanish cultural studies at the University of Manchester. I specialize in the study of music and sound in Spain and the western Mediterranean. Following my first two books, which applied key theory on transnationalism and urban studies to the study of music in Spain and France, my current research studies the racialization of music and sound in colonial Morocco. I am writing a book titled The Empire of the Ear: Music, Race and the Sonic Architecture of Colonial Morocco (OUP, forthcoming), that studies the ways in which musical practice, sound and musicological discourse created complex and ambiguous spaces in which colonial power was consolidated, contested and negotiated. I have co-edited several books, including a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies titled “Spanish Sound Studies.”

Repairing the Past through Spirit Possession Among the Garifuna of Honduras

Abstract: The increasing global circulation of people and ways of living, ideas and objects has highlighted the prolific facets of the phenomenon of spirit possession. The ability of spirits to travel through time and space and to maintain transnational links between cultures and social contexts suggests the need to grasp the unpredictable relations of spirits and process of post-colonialism and globalization, particularly among migrant populations. The present ethnographic study shows the impressive link between spirit possession, subjective experience, collective trauma, exile, and ethnic pride. Repairing the Past through Spirit Possession among the Garifuna of Honduras is an ethnographic account of spirit possession among local mediums who incarnate the spirit of the ancestors. By focusing on recurring patterns of possession, my paper explores how intriguing fragments of a collective past trauma is heavily embodied by individuals. In comparison with other people of African descent in the Americas, the Garifuna’s broad trajectory has taken unexpected shifts since their emergence as a distinct group within the enslaved Caribbean. Their mass deportation to the coast of Central America by the British Crown at the end of the 18th century became a major turning point for this Afro-Amerindian group. Indeed, this traumatic event emerges among individuals’ psychosomatic experiences and ritual performance. During possession scenes, the spirits of the dead broadcast stories that intermingle allusions to the group’s historical racial trauma of dispossession and exile with recriminations to ungrateful kin that have neglected their remembrance. My work shows how the loss of equilibrium caused by the tormented revenants may be reestablished through religious devotion, prioritizing deep down inside the symbolical reparation of a dark colonial past along with the improvement of an individual and collective condition.

Bio:

I am currently a visiting lecturer for the department of religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2019 until 2021, I was a Dietrich School Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow for the same department. In 2019, I received my Ph.D. degree in ethnology and social anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris. During my doctoral training I received two grants for fieldwork conduction from the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (LAS) and from the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) in Paris. My current research interests include the anthropology of African diaspora societies, anthropology of Afro-Atlantic religions, medical and cultural Anthropology, theory of race, historical consciousness, power and inequality, and ethnographic reflexivity.

The Diacritical Role of Music and Dance within an Angolan Ritual Healing System

Abstract:  Xinguilamento is an Angolan  ritual  practice  based  on  the  acquisition and  transmission  of ilundu (plural  of kalundu)  spirits. Ilundu manifest themselves through symptoms similar to those of madness. The ritual therapy is enacted through a family reunion whose aim is to induce possession. Through this therapy, what previously manifested itself as a pathologic representation of ancestry reveals its true nature, typically one or more formerly human spirits from those who have passed on. Once revealed, the ilundu have divinatory and therapeutic functions that their mediums can employ for their families or for customers outside of their family. In Luanda, this same function is also accomplished by other possessional agents:  the so-called “santos” (saints), as they  are  referred  to  in  Portuguese,  the  colonial  language  of  Angola.  While ilundu come from Angolan regions of Africa the saints are Europeans. While ilundu spirits wear red clothing, eat African food and speak the local African language, the saints dress in white, eat European food and express themselves in a European language. In this presentation, based on a 13-month-long ethnographic research conducted in Luanda (the capital of Angola),I  focus on the diacritic role of music and dance within this possessional system. The fact that ilundu rituality is accompanied by percussion –which is not the case in the saints’ rituals–justifies the  use of  different  words  to respectively distinguished ilundu and  saint manifestation. As a consequence, xinguilamento, the term which is used to designate ilundu manifestation, also comes to represent ludic, simulate, and heritigized possession.

Bio 

Federica Toldo earned her joint Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Lisbon and the University of Paris Nanterre. Her thesis focuses on the relational fabrics that emerge from three dances practiced on the Island of Luanda, the carnival dance, the circle dance called rebita, and the xinguilamento dance practiced during the ritual offerings to the mermaid. In 2018, Toldo started a new ethnographic research on xinguilamento ritual and therapeutic practice. Some results are presented in two papers “Transmission and Reciprocity in Funerary Xinguilamento” (Lesedi, 2019) and “De la tradition et son abandon. Acquerir, transmitter et remettre les esprits ancestraux ilundu (Luanda, Angola)” (Lusotopie, September 2021).

Abstract: The Algerian ritual practice known as Diwan of Sidi Bilal emerged out of centuries of the trans-Saharan slave trade, with the forced displacement of various sub-Saharan ethnolinguistic groups. Particularly during the Ottoman Empire, the Black diasporic communities in North Africa co-created “Sufi-esque” music and ritual practices with the intention of addressing mental-emotional pain and suffering. Here, music is understood to ignite bodily-affective responses that then must be worked through the body in semi-codified practices of trance dancing. Moreover, the goal is not to “cure” illness or pain and suffering or to necessarily even “transcend” these experiences, but rather to engage with them, vibrating pain and illness physically and affectively, in order to find a way through. Pain can be agentive, critical to personhood, and, as Talal Asad puts it, a “kind of action.” Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco and Algeria with Afro-Maghribi Bilaliyya Sufi “orders,” this talk examines how sound vibrations and music are not only social as part of a symbolic order, but how they are materially agentive: they affectively impact bodily matter, oftentimes regardless of human agency. That is to say that music is often thought about medicinally, as not just temporal, aesthetic experience but as vibrating agents in ongoing wellbeing and health maintenance. Indeed, diwan epistemologies force us to ask what “healing” means when illness, pain, and suffering are not considered adversarial to a meaningful, rich, and flourishing life. Particularly given the historical trauma of slavery at the root of diwan, what does it mean to be “healed” when certain kinds of suffering resist closure?

Bio 

Tamara Turner is an interdisciplinary anthropologist and ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of psychological and medical anthropology, sound/music studies, affect/emotion and expressive arts. She is particularly engaged with relationships between the arts and mental-emotional health, race, religion, and postcolonialism in North Africa and its diasporas. Her award-winning doctoral thesis was the first ethnomusicological research to thoroughly document the musical repertoire, practice, and history of Algerian diwan, a nocturnal trance ritual of the Bilaliyya Sufi Order that emerged out of the trans-Saharan slave trade.