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Paper short abstract:

My presentation will focus on how this concept of transcorporeality functions in the Cuban religion of Lucumí / Santería. It narrates my interaction, observations and conversations with Fran, a Cuban Lucumí initiate, as he reflects on the role that the religion acquires in the Cuban Diaspora in the United States. I provide a diasporic ethnography of Lucumí through this informant and the work and life of queer Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, followed by an extended discussion on the role of the body in the work of Cuban surrealist artist Wifredo Lam.

Paper long abstract:

My forthcoming book Black Atlantic Transcorporealities establishes the concept of transcorporeality as the distinct Afro-Diasporic cultural representation of the human psyche as multiple, removable and external to a body that functions as its receptacle. This unique view of the body, preserved in its most evident form in African religious traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, allows the regendering of the bodies of initiates who are mounted and ridden by deities of a gender different than their own during the ritual ecstasy of trance possession. Through discussions of novels, paintings, films and interviews, my book assembles and interprets a representative collection of such transcendental moments in which the commingling of the human and the divine produces subjectivities whose gender is not dictated by biological sex. In so doing, it demonstrates that while transcorporeality is rooted in the religious practice of trance possession, its effects spill over into the every day life of participants and observers of these religions and becomes a leading feature of nearly every aspect of Afro-Diasporic cultural production.