Archives of Conjure

Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-0-231-19432-7
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 224 mm x 146 mm, Gewicht: 438 g

Reihe: Gender, Theory, and Religion

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Otero, Solimar

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Sonstige Religionen Sexualität & Gender in den Religionen
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Volkskunde: Sitten, Traditionen, Mythen, Legenden
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Sonstige Religionen Indigene Religionen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie des Brauchtums und der Traditionen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Lateinamerikanische Literaturen, Spanische Literatur außerhalb Europas
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Religionsethnologie

Über Autor(innen)

Solimar Otero is professor of folklore in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She is the author of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World (2010) and coeditor of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in Latino/a and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas (2013).