Background
Ivor Miller was born on November 2, 1960, in Palo Alto, California, United States. He is the son of Lynn and Jean Miller.
893 West St, Amherst, MA 01002, United States
Ivor got a Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College in 1985.
New Haven, CT 06520, United States
Ivor received a Master of Arts from Yale University in 1990.
633 Clark St, Evanston, IL 60208, United States
Ivor received a Doctor of Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1995.
Photo of Ivor Miller
Photo of Ivor Miller
Photo of Ivor Miller
Photo of Ivor Miller
(In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cub...)
In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role in the history of Cuba. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross River basin. Instead, each settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society called Ékpè, or "leopard," which was the highest indigenous authority. Ékpè lodges ruled local communities while also managing regional and long-distance trade. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to colonial Cuba, reorganized their Ékpè clubs covertly in Havana and Matanzas into a mutual-aid society called Abakuá, which became foundational to Cuba's urban life and music. Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain a deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership. Voice of the Leopard is an unprecedented tracing of an African title-society to its Caribbean incarnation, which has deeply influenced Cuba's creative energy and popular consciousness.
https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Leopard-African-Societies-Caribbean/dp/1617033197/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Ivor+Miller&qid=1609940380&sr=8-1
2009
Ivor Miller was born on November 2, 1960, in Palo Alto, California, United States. He is the son of Lynn and Jean Miller.
Ivor got a Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College in 1985. He also received a Master of Arts from Yale University in 1990, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1995.
Ivor Miller is a cultural historian specializing in the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas. He has traveled extensively in West Africa, South America, and the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba, where he did research from 1991-2013, conducting interviews, recording video, and taking photographs.
He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History & International Studies at the University of Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria. He has been a Research Fellow at the African Studies Center, Boston University, since 2006.
His dissertation (1995) focused on the Lukumi-Yoruba initiation systems of Ocha and Ifa (Santería) in Cuban society, the relationship of its practitioners and symbols to the nation's political class, as well as its influences in the United States. In collaboration with Wande Abimbola, in 1997 he published a book on the trans-Atlantic reach of Yoruba culture, in Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, and the USA: Ifá Will Mend Our Broken World.
His book Aerosol Kingdom (2002) documents and interprets the creation of Hip Hop culture in New York City from its beginnings in the late 1960s till the present, focusing on the Afro-Caribbean and African-American contributions resulting from 20th-century migrations. Miller's most recent book, Voice of the Leopard (2009), documents the little known history of the Cuban Abakuá, a mutual-aid institution derived from the Ekpe (leopard) society of the Cross River region of Nigeria and Cameroon. Working with both Ékpè and Abakuá leaders, he has documented the foundation of the society in 19th century Havana, and its adaptations to Cuban society. Abakuá lore in Cuba has proven useful to Cross River peoples as they reconstruct their own cultural history.
Miller has also written about Cuban artists working with initiation-symbols from African-derived systems, for example, Juan Boza, Leandro Soto, and Francisco "Gordillo" Arredondo.
(In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cub...)
2009During his research, Miller has identified many cultural links between Africa and the Americas, particularly between Cuba, Nigeria, and Cameroon, which share a common heritage. He views the Cuban initiation system known as Abakuá, which was based on Ékpè society, as a collective way for African descendants to maintain their historical memory
Miller is working on a visual study of common ritual symbols shared by Cubans and Africans from Cross River. He is collecting archival images and creating his own photographs of ritual performance where symbols are displayed in ceremonial contexts.
In Cross River, archaeology is still rudimentary and linguistics has not advanced far beyond a colonial dictionary of Efik, a language spoken by Calabar traders. Meanwhile, the history of many African countries written during the colonial period does not meaningfully reflect the cultural traditions of their peoples.
Miller argues that studying the culture of initiation shared between the Cross River region and the Caribbean would benefit young people in these regions who lack knowledge about their heritage. Awareness of how African descendants in the Caribbean struggled to maintain their heritage could help solve identity crises in younger generations in Cameroon and Nigeria.
Miller hopes to stimulate curiosity and inquisitiveness among young people in Africa. "Many seem to be uninterested in important aspects of their indigenous heritage. One cannot understand the contemporary Cross River region without knowledge of how colonial administrations diminished the indigenous governing institutions, like Ékpè."