About
Renée Alexander Craft is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a specialization in Black Diaspora literature, culture, and performance. Her writings include critical essays, long-form print and digital publications that reflect her academic research, children’s books, poetry, and fiction. Her book-length publications include When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in 20th Century Panama, a monograph that reflects her ethnographic research within the Afro-Latin community of Portobelo, Panama; The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, which she co-edited with Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, and Thomas F. DeFrantz; and I Will Love You Everywhere Always, a children’s book dedicated to helping children cope with death and loss. She is currently completing a novel titled She Looks Like Us, which was inspired by her field research in a tight-knit Afro-Latin community in Panama and her experiences growing up in a community of African American kin in North Carolina.
Featured Work
When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama
Despite its long history of encounters with colonialism, slavery, and neocolonialism, Panama continues to be an under-researched site of African Diaspora identity, culture, and performance. To address this void, Renée Alexander Craft examines an Afro-Latin Carnival performance tradition called “Congo” as it is enacted in the town of Portobelo, Panama―the nexus of trade in the Spanish colonial world. In When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama, Alexander Craft draws on over a decade of critical ethnographic research to argue that Congo traditions tell the story of cimarronaje, charting self-liberated Africans’ triumph over enslavement, their parody of the Spanish Crown and Catholic Church, their central values of communalism and self-determination, and their hard-won victories toward national inclusion and belonging.
When the Devil Knocks analyzes the Congo tradition as a dynamic cultural, ritual, and identity performance that tells an important story about a Black cultural past while continuing to create itself in a Black cultural present. This book examines “Congo” within the history of twentieth-century Panamanian etnia negra culture, politics, and representation, including its circulation within the political economy of contemporary tourism.
