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Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty
Winner of the 2021 Gregory Bateson Book Prize presented by the Society for Cultural Anthropology
Winner of the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize presented by the Association for Queer Anthropology
Theoretically wide-ranging and deeply personal and poetic, Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is based on more than three years of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic. Ana-Maurine Lara draws on her engagement in traditional ceremonies, observations of national Catholic celebrations, and interviews with activists from peasant, feminist, and LGBT communities to reframe contemporary conversations about queerness and blackness. The result is a rich ethnography of the ways criollo spiritual practices challenge gender and racial binaries and manifest what Lara characterizes as a shared desire for decolonization.
Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is also a ceremonial ofrenda, or offering, in its own right. At its heart is a fundamental How can we enable "queer : black" life in all its forms, and what would it mean to be "free : sovereign" in the twenty-first century? Calling on the reader to join her in exploring possible answers, Lara maintains that the analogy between these terms—queerness and blackness, freedom and sovereignty—is necessarily incomplete and unresolved, to be determined only by ongoing processes of embodied, relational knowledge production. Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty thus follows figures such as Sylvia Wynter, María Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, Mark Rifkin, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde in working to theorize a potential roadmap to decolonization.
Winner of the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize presented by the Association for Queer Anthropology
Theoretically wide-ranging and deeply personal and poetic, Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is based on more than three years of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic. Ana-Maurine Lara draws on her engagement in traditional ceremonies, observations of national Catholic celebrations, and interviews with activists from peasant, feminist, and LGBT communities to reframe contemporary conversations about queerness and blackness. The result is a rich ethnography of the ways criollo spiritual practices challenge gender and racial binaries and manifest what Lara characterizes as a shared desire for decolonization.
Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is also a ceremonial ofrenda, or offering, in its own right. At its heart is a fundamental How can we enable "queer : black" life in all its forms, and what would it mean to be "free : sovereign" in the twenty-first century? Calling on the reader to join her in exploring possible answers, Lara maintains that the analogy between these terms—queerness and blackness, freedom and sovereignty—is necessarily incomplete and unresolved, to be determined only by ongoing processes of embodied, relational knowledge production. Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty thus follows figures such as Sylvia Wynter, María Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, Mark Rifkin, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde in working to theorize a potential roadmap to decolonization.
- GenresNonfictionQueer
190 pages, Hardcover
Published November 1, 2020
4 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
About the author
Ana-Maurine Lara
15 books17 followersAna-Maurine Lara is a Dominican American lesbian poet, novelist and black feminist scholar. Lara is a long-time LGBT human rights activist and supporter, having served on the Board of Directors for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 26, 2022
In Ana-Maurine Lara’s Queer freedom: Black sovereignty, she includes the reader as part of the spiritual exploration of ofrenda or a ceremony to establish premises that exist within Dominican Republic, and which crillo spiritual practices contextualized within these frameworks challenge them and offer a roadmap to decolonization. She establishes premises that include how structures of knowledge, power, sex, race, gender, and being that were established during colonization based in socio-economic-political relationships continue through on-going temporal-spatial relationships requiring that decolonization must take place through spiritual-religious grounds. The ceremony structures the work beginning with an opening ceremony implicating the reader as a part of the process of centralizing and analogizing Blackness and Queerness and freedom and sovereignty. Ana-Maurine Lara then goes on to explore altars-puntos, body-lands, water-memories, war, and finally concluding with the closing ceremony based in ethnography conducted in the DR.
Ana-Maurine Lara’s work ties to adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change Changing Worlds as both works weave and cast large nets constantly bringing in other theorists, organizers, activists, spiritualists, healers, and poets to work towards a better future. According to brown, “[Emergent Strategy] is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us” (brown 2017), though brown’s work is accessible and targeting more change within organizing based on her experience whereas Lara is working on years of research and changes for international decolonziation. These queer Black authors center themselves both in identity, culture, history, and community. In more tangible ways, such as high-levels of footnotes that situate their work with dozens, if not hundreds, of other scholars, both theorists work to create a more inclusive scholarship.
Ana-Maurine Lara’s work ties to adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change Changing Worlds as both works weave and cast large nets constantly bringing in other theorists, organizers, activists, spiritualists, healers, and poets to work towards a better future. According to brown, “[Emergent Strategy] is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us” (brown 2017), though brown’s work is accessible and targeting more change within organizing based on her experience whereas Lara is working on years of research and changes for international decolonziation. These queer Black authors center themselves both in identity, culture, history, and community. In more tangible ways, such as high-levels of footnotes that situate their work with dozens, if not hundreds, of other scholars, both theorists work to create a more inclusive scholarship.
March 27, 2025
"Reading is reading the person's actions as well as who guards their head" (58).
So interesting... Lara reframed so many of my previous knowings..."reading" as a form of kinship among the LGBT community, intersectionality as a spiritual paradigm, re-evaluting "queerness" to be embodying non-normative ideologies (rather than the Western colonial impositions)...
So interesting... Lara reframed so many of my previous knowings..."reading" as a form of kinship among the LGBT community, intersectionality as a spiritual paradigm, re-evaluting "queerness" to be embodying non-normative ideologies (rather than the Western colonial impositions)...
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March 2, 2025opening ceremony, altars-puntos, body-lands, water-memories
March 29, 2024
The most incredible book I’ve read for so many reasons. Speechless, can’t recommend it enough, if I could give it a million stars I would
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews