| Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures Contributor(s): Otero, Solimar (Author) |
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ISBN: 0231194323 ISBN-13: 9780231194327 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $89.10 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: March 2020 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Religion | Ethnic & Tribal - Literary Criticism | Caribbean & Latin American - Religion | Sexuality & Gender Studies |
| Dewey: 133.909 |
| LCCN: 2019038651 |
| Series: Gender, Theory, and Religion |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 5.6" W x 8.6" (0.95 lbs) 264 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Latin America |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santer a, and Brazilian Candombl , the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums' bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. In this book, Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race. Otero argues that what she calls archives of conjure are produced through residual transcriptions or reverberations of the stories of the dead whose archives are stitched, beaded, smoked, and washed into official and unofficial repositories. She investigates how sites like the ocean, rivers, and institutional archives create connected contexts for unlocking the spatial activation of residual transcriptions. Drawing on over ten years of archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Otero centers the storytelling practices of Afrolatinx women and LGBTQ spiritual practitioners alongside Caribbean literature and performance. Archives of Conjure offers vital new perspectives on ephemerality, temporality, and material culture, unraveling undertheorized questions about how spirits shape communities of practice, ethnography, literature, and history and revealing the deeply connected nature of art, scholarship, and worship. |
Contributor Bio(s): Otero, Solimar: - Solimar Otero (PhD, Folklore and Folklife, Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of English, Director of the Ogden Honors College Summer Study Abroad Program in Cuba, and Director of the Program in Caribbean Studies at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World (Rochester, 2013) and coeditor (with Toyin Falola) of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas (SUNY, 2013), which was a finalist for the Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions from the Journal of Africana Religions. She specializes in gender, sexuality, and spirituality in the Afro-Caribbean world. |