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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.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Archives of Conjure
1. Residual Transcriptions
2. Crossings
3. Flows
4. Sirens
Conclusion: Espuma del Mar, Sea- Foam
Notes
References
Index
About the author
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).
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.
Additional text
Archives of Conjure is at times a hypnotic séance conjuring such ancestors as Reinaldo Arenas, Lydia Cabrera, Edouard Glissant, Ruth Landes, and Fernando Ortiz and at times a siren call to attune our scholarship to the feminist, queer, subaltern spiritual 'work' of performance and its archival traces, hidden in plain sight. Through the generative metaphors produced by narratives of 'the two waters,' personified in the orichas Yemayá and Ochún, Otero explores critical engagements between circum-Caribbean scholarship and religious practice. I recommend Otero’s brilliant book as required reading for folklorists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and all who would better understand 'redoubled' global-Caribbean histories that manifest in and through vernacular Afrolatinx spiritual perspectives.
