Refuge in Thunder

Rachel E. Harding is Director of The Veterans of Hope Project at the Iliff School of Theology. She earned a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Colorado in 1997. Her essay "'What Part of the River You're In': African-American Women in Devotion to Osun" appears in Osun across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas (Indiana University Press, 2001). Harding is also a poet and has published work in Callaloo, Chelsea, Feminist Studies, The International Review of African American Art, Hambone, and several anthologies.

• ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Slavery, Africanos Libertos and the Question of Black Presence in Nineteenth-Century Brazil2. Salvador: The Urban Environment3. The Bolsa de Mandinga and Calundu: Afro-Brazilian Religion as Fetish and Fetiçaria 4. "Dis Continuity," Context and Documentation: Origins and Interpretations of the Religion5. The Nineteenth-Century Development of Candomblé6. Healing and Cultivating Axé: Profiles of Candomblé Leaders and Communities7. Networks of Support, Spaces of Resistance: Alternative Orientations of Black Life in Nineteenth-Century Bahia8. Candomblé as Feitiço: Reterritorialization, Embodiment and the Alchemy of History in an Afro-Brazilian ReligionCoda: Abolition, Freedom and Candomblé as Alternative Cidadania in Brazil.GlossaryAppendix: Selected Documents from the Arquivo Público do Estado da BahiaNotesBibliography

"[An important] detailing of the development and evolution of a major institution of the African Diaspora [and] of Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian identity." Sheila S. Walker