Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures

Gender, Theory, and Religion

by Solimar Otero

Winner of the 2021 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions.  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.

Genres: Latinx

264 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2020

Reviews

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solimar Otero's Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures ruminates on spirit-led archival practices in Cuban Santería and Brazilian Candomble. Whether hastily scribbled on the back of a 1930s business card in Brazil, carefully written down like a prescription at a 2013 Cuban misa espiritual, or inscribed on strings of beads cared for by practitioners, Otero shows us the complex negotiations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and incorporeality that take place between practitioners, practitioner-scholars, and the spirit world. Her attention to LGBTQ+ practitioners and modes of understanding spirit deserves particular praise here, alongside the fascinating finds of her dives in the unpublished papers of "imperfect ancestors" Lydia Cabrera and Ruth Landes. Spectacular.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really torn between a 3 and 4. I love the framework for an archive of conjure, this sea foam archive exists outside of western epistemologies. I found the ethnographic project less personally interesting, which is why I went with the lower review.