Description: 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.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: Going beyond academic analysis and theorizing, Archives of Conjure highlights the power of ethnography that is an act of resistance and empowerment as well as sustenance for the researcher and the community. Otero's own life experiences along with the experiences of those she works with--both in the spirit world and in the physical world--become part of the archival research that elucidates the role of vernacular religion in contemporary world. This book is a gift of magic.--Norma E. Cantú, coeditor of meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction