Transnational Yoruba revivalism and the diasporic politics of heritage

This article explores the making of social membership in U.S.-based deterritorialized contexts and interrogate the ways that black-Atlantic diasporic imaginaries are intertwined to produce transnational notions of linkage. In charting a genealogy of a transnational orisa movement that came of age in a moment of black-nationalist protest, I pose questions about how such a study should be understood in relation to ethnographies of global networks. I argue that, despite their seemingly thin representations of broad forms of linkage, transnational orisa networks produce culturally portable practices that articulate important transformations: They shape institutions through which new forms of religious knowledge are producing significant breaks with older forms.