Archives of conjure : stories of the dead in Afrolatinx cultures

Resource Information

The work Archives of conjure : stories of the dead in Afrolatinx cultures represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Bates College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Archives of conjure : stories of the dead in Afrolatinx cultures

Title remainder

stories of the dead in Afrolatinx cultures

Statement of responsibility

Solimar Otero

Creator

• Otero, Solimar

Subject

• Black people -- Caribbean Area -- Religious life
• Black people -- Caribbean Area -- Rites and ceremonies
• Caribbean Area -- Religious life and customs
• Material culture -- Religious aspects
• Afro-Caribbean cults
• Spiritualism -- Caribbean Area
• Water -- Religious aspects
• Women and spiritualism -- Caribbean Area
• Spirits

Language

eng

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"--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

LBSOR/DLC

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

Series statement

Gender, theory, and religion