ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Africana spiritual nationhood as a foundation built upon family and cultural inheritance, one’s relationship to land, and claimed religious belonging. I first investigate historical West African conceptions of spiritual nationhood, as devotees vowed to learn the customs and languages of both local and “foreign” spirits. I then demonstrate how this practice survived even under the hardships of enslavement in African Diaspora nations such as Brazil, Grenada, Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad, the United States, and Haiti. In their foreign new “homelands,” African-descended religious devotees reestablished spiritual nations and undertook sacred spirit oaths to protect African ethno-religious lineages in the Americas. Lastly, as African Diaspora divinities hail from diverse African spiritual nations, I underscore how these “multinational” spirits offer insightful understandings of mythic and historical ethnic origins, AfroAtlantic citizenship, and the civil religion of spiritual nationhood.
