Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou, Paperback

In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucum /Santer a, and Brazilian Candombl to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.

Roberto Strongman is Associate Professor of Comparative Caribbean Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.