Archives of Conjure

Archives of Conjure makes important contributions to the study of religion in the Caribbean and Latin America by challenging scholarly understandings of the archive, centering the connection between Afrolatinx communities and non-human agents, as well as the attention it pays to the nuances of religious belief and practice for women and LGBTQ+ spiritual practitioners. -- Sierra L. Lawson * Reading Religion *
Solimar Otero's timely work unites an array of Afrolatinx religious perspectives with fresh ethnographic and folkloristic interventions. Archives of Conjure confidently and sensitively furthers our understanding of enmeshed interactions of spirits, deities, and persons - and reconceptualizes the types of work that help unite rather than separate the realms of the living and the dead. -- Mastin Tsang * Journal of Folklore Research Reviews *
The value of this book is in pointing out what lies at the margins, out of the official transcripts, … what is only alluded to, what is not classifiable, what is only gleaned or available through gossip, or dreams…what sits outside the norm of scholarship with its claims to knowledge. * New West Indian Guide *
Archives of Conjure is a poetic, fluid, and compelling book. By producing an 'archive of conjure' pieced together through interwoven elements of ethnography, literature, archival notations, bolero music, poetry, and other Afrolatinx inspirations, Solimar Otero provides humanities scholarship with a new, transdisciplinary technique and approach. This is a powerful intervention and must read! -- Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion
Going beyond academic analysis and theorizing, Archives of Conjure highlights the power of ethnography that is an act of resistance and empowerment as well as sustenance for the researcher and the community. Otero’s own life experiences along with the experiences of those she works with—both in the spirit world and in the physical world—become part of the archival research that elucidates the role of vernacular religion in contemporary world. This book is a gift of magic. -- Norma E. Cantú, coeditor of meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction
In Archives of Conjure, Solimar Otero calls forth a profound new vista on how the dead make life matter. Led by her teachers among the living and the dead in Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil, Otero vitalizes history and quotidian materials to bring us closer to the scintillating poetry of African-inspired creativity in the Black Atlantic. At once a work of ingenious scholarship and skillful piece of writing, Archives of Conjure is an invitation to worlds where what is most important—kin, dreams, memories and views into the future—is made and unmade by the surging potentials of the dead. -- Todd Ramón Ochoa, author of A Party for Lazarus: Six Generations of Ancestral Devotion in a Cuban Town
Archives of Conjure is at times a hypnotic séance conjuring such ancestors as Reinaldo Arenas, Lydia Cabrera, Edouard Glissant, Ruth Landes, and Fernando Ortiz and at times a siren call to attune our scholarship to the feminist, queer, subaltern spiritual 'work' of performance and its archival traces, hidden in plain sight. Through the generative metaphors produced by narratives of 'the two waters,' personified in the orichas Yemayá and Ochún, Otero explores critical engagements between circum-Caribbean scholarship and religious practice. I recommend Otero’s brilliant book as required reading for folklorists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and all who would better understand 'redoubled' global-Caribbean histories that manifest in and through vernacular Afrolatinx spiritual perspectives. -- Kristina Wirtz, author of Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History
This book is particularly useful as a model of a collaborative approach to ethnographic research.. * Religious Studies Review *
For scholars of religion, Otero’s work offers creative archival and ethnohermeneutic modalities that show us how to center a practitioner epistemology at the core of Afrolatinx religious research itself. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *