Orisa in the Ghetto: The Black Divine

The first part in a series of shorts that explores various aspects of the Yoruba Orisa pantheon in urban areas of the United States. It answers the first question, "What does Orisa look like in the ghetto."

The concept was to see how people of the African diaspora (and specifically those who are descendants of Africans removed via the slave trade) envisioned themselves as divine. The question I posed to participants who prepared for the film was, “If you were an orisa, how would you present yourself?” Asking participants to perform how they construct and imagine African gods, presents another method of understand black representations in which the subjects — including the researcher — are producers and consumers of media.

A fusion of Afrofuturism, African storytelling, and African diaspora culture is narrates the black experience in the new millennium.