In Hindu Gods in West Africa, Wuaku offers an account of the histories, beliefs and practices of the Hindu Monastery of Africa and the Radha Govinda Temple, two Hindu Temples in Ghana. Using historical material and data from his field work in southern Ghana, Wuaku shows how these two Hindu Temples build their traditions on popular Ghanaian religious notions about the powerful magicality of India's Hindu gods. He explores how Ghanaian soldiers who served in the colonial armies in India, Sri Lanka, and Burma during World War II, Bollywood films, and local magicians, have contributed to the production and the spreading of these cultural ideas. He argues that while Ghanaian worshippers appropriated and deployed the alien Hindu religious world through their own cultural ideas, as they engage Hindu beliefs and rituals in negotiating challenges their own worldviews would change considerably.

This book traces the visual cultures and histories of Mami Wata and other African water divinities. Mami Wata, often portrayed with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, is at once beautiful, jealous, generous, seductive, and potentially deadly. A water spirit widely known across Africa and the African diaspora, her origins are said to lie "overseas," although she has been thoroughly incorporated into local beliefs and practics. She can bring good fortune in the form of money, and her power increased between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the era of growing international trade between Africa and the rest of the world. Her name, which may be translated as "Mother Water" or "Mistress Water," is pidgin English, a language developed to lubricate trade. Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic as part of that "trade" brought with them their beliefs and practices honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities. Henry John Drewal is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Other contributors include Marilyn Houlberg, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Amy L. Noell, John W. Nunley, and Jill Salmons.

Vishnu -- Hinduism's most important and powerful deity -- is the great Preserver, vanquishing those who seek to destroy the balance of the universe. For his followers he is also the Creator and the Destroyer, the cause of all existence. His many traits are embodied in his impressive physical form, the weapons he carries, the goddesses who are his consorts, and the eagle Garuda, on whom he flies down from heaven. In Hindu legend, Vishnu descends to earth in many manifestations, known as avatars, to fight powerful demons and to save his devotees. The avatars range in form from Varaha the boar to Parashurama the Brahmin warrior, and in character from Narasimha the ferocious half-man half-lion, to Krishna the charismatic prince-cowherd. The legends of Vishnu have inspired some of the greatest art, literature, and ritual traditions in India. This catalogue examines the many faces of Vishnu and the ways that the god has been represented, from antiquity to the present. Essays by noted historians of South Asian art delve deeply into the regional and sectarian traditions of Vishnu worship in India. Illustrations and discussions of almost 200 works of art, in a wide range of media and borrowed from collections around the world, reveal the rich diversity of India's art and religious culture.

Whether referred to as mermaid, usalka, mami wata, or by some other name, and whether considered an imaginary being or merely a person with extraordinary abilities, the siren is the remarkable creature that has inspired music and its representations from ancient Greece to present-day Africa and Latin America. This book, co-edited by a historical musicologist and an ethnomusicologist, brings together leading scholars and some talented newcomers in classics, music, media studies, literature, and cultural studies to consider the siren and her multifaceted relationships to music across human time and geography.

In this book, Eric Montgomery and Christian Vannier provide an ethnographically informed text on the cultural meanings and practices surrounding the gods and metaphysics of Vodu, as they relate to daily life in an ethnic Ewe fishing community on the coast of southern Togo. The authors approach this spirit possession and medicinal order through "shrine ethnography," understanding shrines as parts of sacred landscapes that are ecological, economic, political, and social. Giving voice to practitioners and situating shrines and Vodu itself into the history and political economy of the region make this text pertinent to the social changes and global relevance of Millennial Africa.

Taking as its starting-point the ambiguous heritage left by the British Empire to its former colonies, dominions and possessions, And the Birds Began to Sing marks a new departure in the interdisciplinary study of religion and literature. Gathered under the rubric Christianity and Colonialism, essays on Brian Moore. Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood and Marian Engel, Thomas King, Les A. Murray, David Malouf, Mudrooroo and Philip McLaren, R.A.K. Mason, Maurice Gee, Keri Hulme, Epeli Hau'ofa, J.M. Coetzee, Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Ngugi wa Thiong'o explore literary portrayals of the effects of British Christianity upon settler and native cultures in Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, and the Africas. These essays share a sense of the dominant presence of Christianity as an inherited system of religious thought and practice to be adapted to changing post-colonial conditions or to be resisted as the lingering ideology of colonial times. In the second section of the collection, Empire and World Religions, essays on Paule Marshall and George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Olive Senior and Caribbean poetry, V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Bharati Mukherjee interrogate literature exploring relations between the scions of British imperialism and religious traditions other than Christianity. Expressly concerned with literary embodiments of belief-systems in post-colonial cultures (particularly West African religions in the Caribbean and Hinduism on the Indian subcontinent), these essays also share a sense of Christianity as the pervasive presence of an ideological rhetoric among the economic, social and political dimensions of imperialism. In a polemical Afterword, the editor argues that modes of reading religion and literature in post-colonial cultures are characterised by a theodical preoccupation with a praxis of equity.