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Podcast: New Books in Caribbean Studies
Episode: Roberto Strongman, "Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, SanterÃa, and Vodou" (Duke UP, 2019)
Description: In Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, SanterÃa, and Vodou (Duke University Press, 2019), Roberto Strongman reveals the many non-heteronormative texts, practices and beliefs though which Black Atlantic religious practices in Haiti, Cuba and Brazil were constituted. Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban LucumÃ/SanterÃa, and Brazilian Candomblé 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, th...