"Archives of Conjure: Co-creation and Performing with the Dead"
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. Taken from her book, Archives of Conjure, Solimar Otero’s lecture will explore 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.
Please join is in celebrating the launch of Dr. Otero's book, which will be for sale following her lecture.
Solimar Otero is Professor of Folklore and Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also the editor of the Journal of Folklore Research. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, performance, literature, and ethnography. She is the author of Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (Columbia University Press 2020), which won the 2021 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions. She is also the author of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, (University of Rochester Press, 2010); co-editor of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas (SUNY Press 2013); and co-editor of Theorizing Folklore from the Margins: Critical and Ethical Approaches (Indiana University Press, 2021). Dr. Otero is a Folklore Fellow of the American Folklore Society; the recipient of a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund grant; a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program; and a Fulbright award.