Invocation : To Bust Your Shell -- Reborn Again : Orphan Initiations, Motherless Lands -- The Ancestral House. Down to the Mire : Travels, Shouts, and Saraka in Atlantic Praise-Housings ; Lift Every Voice and Swing : James Weldon Johnson's God-Met Places and Native Lands -- Les Invisibles. Fe Chauffe, Balanse, Swing : Saint-Domingue Refugees in the Govi of New Orleans ; Making Faces at the Sublime : Momentum from within Creole City -- Sangre y Monte. "Come and Gaze on a Mystery" : Zora Neale Hurston's Rain-Bringing Authority ; "Vamonos pa'l Monte" : Into Florida's Repeating Bush -- "White Women Have Never Known What to Do with Their Blood" : Gulf Carriers and Sanguine Knowledge
Summary
"We're seeing people that we didn't know exist," the director of FEMA acknowledged in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This book offers a corrective to some of America's institutionalized invisibilities by delving into the submerged networks of ritual performance, writing, intercultural history, and migration that have linked the coastal U.S. South with the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. This interdisciplinary study slips beneath the bar of rigid national and literary periods, embarking upon deeper - more rhythmic and embodied - signatures of time
