Archives of Conjure : Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures / Solimar Otero.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Otero, Solimar, Author.

Series:

Gender, theory, and religion.

Gender, Theory, and Religion

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Spiritualism--Caribbean Area.

Spiritualism.

Caribbean Area--Religious life and customs.

Caribbean Area.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (265 pages).

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: Archives of Conjure

1. Residual Transcriptions

2. Crossings

3. Flows

4. Sirens

Conclusion: Espuma del Mar, Sea- Foam

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

0-231-55076-6

OCLC:

1128887492