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What roles do queer and transgender people play in the African diasporic religions? Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Participation in African-Inspired Traditions in the Americas is a groundbreaking scholarly exploration of this long-neglected subject. It offers clear insight into the complex dynamics of gender and sexual orientation, humans and deities, and race and ethnicity, within these richly nuanced spiritual practices. Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions explores the ways in which gender complexity and same-sex intimacy are integral to the primary beliefs and practices of these faiths. It begins with a comprehensive overview of Vodou, Santeria, and other African-based religions. The second section includes extensive, revealing interviews with practitioners who offer insight into the intersection of their beliefs, their sexual orientation, and their gender identity. Finally, it provides a powerful analysis of the ways these traditions have inspired artists, musicians, and writers such as Audre Lorde, as well as informative interviews with the artists themselves. In Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions, you will discover: how the presence of androgynous divinities affects both faith and practice in Vodou, Candomble, Santeria, and other Creole religions how the phenomenon of possession or embodiment by a god or goddess may validate queer identity and nurture gender complexity who practices the African-derived spiritual traditions, what they believe, and who their deities are how these faiths have influenced the art and aesthetic traditions of the West This landmark book opens a fascinating new world of thought and belief. The authors provide rigorous documentation and faultless scholarly method as well as personal experience and the testimony of believers. Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions sheds new light on two widely different fields: LGBT studies and the theology of the African diaspora. A thorough bibliography points the way to further study, and an extensive photograph gallery provides a unique look at the believers and their practices. Every library with holdings in queer theory, African mythology, or sociology of religion should have this landmark volume.
Did you know that in medieval French folklore a person might change sex by passing under a rainbow? Or that same-sex unions have been celebrated by peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, Africa, China, and Indigenous America? Or that Sappho, da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, Nijinsky, Benjamin Britten, Mishima, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Boy George, and Derek Jarman number among those who have explored the spiritual dimension of gender and sexuality in their works? While the terms many of us employ today to identify ourselves - 'queer', 'lesbian', 'gay', 'bisexual', 'transgendered' - differ markedly from those of peoples of other times and places, we are nevertheless the bearers of a rich spiritual history that has been ignored or suppressed, a history encoded in sacred texts as well as in works of art, music, dance and other media. Drawing upon religion, mythology, folklore, anthropology, history and the arts, the Encyclopedia is a cornucopia of queer spirituality, containing over 1,500 alphabetically arranged entries from Aakulujjuusi to Zeus.
Exploring the Yoruba tradition in the United States, Hucks begins with the story of Nana Oseijeman Adefunmi’s personal search for identity and meaning as a young man in Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s. She traces his development as an artist, religious leader, and founder of several African-influenced religio-cultural projects in Harlem and later in the South. Adefunmi was part of a generation of young migrants attracted to the bohemian lifestyle of New York City and the black nationalist fervor of Harlem. Cofounding Shango Temple in 1959, Yoruba Temple in 1960, and Oyotunji African Village in 1970, Adefunmi and other African Americans in that period renamed themselves “Yorubas” and engaged in the task of transforming Cuban Santer'a into a new religious expression that satisfied their racial and nationalist leanings and eventually helped to place African Americans on a global religious schema alongside other Yoruba practitioners in Africa and the diaspora. Alongside the story of Adefunmi, Hucks weaves historical and sociological analyses of the relationship between black cultural nationalism and reinterpretations of the meaning of Africa from within the African American community.
The first multi-cultural exploration of the sacred experience, roles, and rituals of gay and gender-bending men, from the ancient priests of the goddess to Oscar Wilde and pop music icon Sylvester--a rich tradition of men who have embodied the interrelationship between androgyny, homoeroticism, and the quest for the sacred. Illustrations and photos.
In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, 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, 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.
Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a "survival," or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world. With counterparts in Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad, and the United States, Candomblé is a religion of spirit possession, dance, healing, and blood sacrifice. Most surprising to those who imagine Candomblé and other such religions as the products of anonymous folk memory is the fact that some of this religion's towering leaders and priests have been either well-traveled writers or merchants, whose stake in African-inspired religion was as much commercial as spiritual. Morever, they influenced Africa as much as Brazil. Thus, for centuries, Candomblé and its counterparts have stood at the crux of enormous transnational forces. Vividly combining history and ethnography, Matory spotlights a so-called "folk" religion defined not by its closure or internal homogeneity but by the diversity of its connections to classes and places often far away. Black Atlantic Religion sets a new standard for the study of transnationalism in its subaltern and often ancient manifestations.
A long-awaited new edition of the seminal text on the spiritual system that is a convergence of Gnosticism and Haitian voodoo, The Voudon Gnostic Workbook is a singular sacred work that is comprehensive in scope -- from "how to be a lucky Hoodoo" to how magick and voodoo intersect energetically, to esoteric time travel. Complete with charts and graphs and instructive interdimensional physics, The Voudon Gnostic Workbook is an "object of desire" among students of the occult. Weiser's long-anticipated republication of this rare text will be an event in the annals of esoteric publishing, as the book itself is somewhat of an "unholy grail." There are listservers devoted to it and much discussion of the mysteries held within its pages. While The Voudon Gnostic Workbook has remained a controversial book considered important for masters of metaphysics, it recently came into popular culture and renewed popularity when Grant Morrison revealed it had been the inspiration for his cult comics The Invisibles, using the cribbed time travel from Bertiaux' s masterwork. Voodoo is not an evil religion and is much misunderstood. It derives from the Dahomean Gods called the "Loa." Esoteric voodoo is actually a highly practical procedure for leading us into making contact with the deepest levels of our being and most ancient modes of consciousness. Michael Bertiaux's Voudon Gnostic Workbook is the most comprehensive and illuminating contemporary book on the subject. Launched out of a correspondence course and series of classes for students and followers of Voudon Gnosticism and the OTO, this seminal text is at once one of the most mysterious and magnificent of all esoteric books.
A brilliant Jamaican-American writer takes on the themes of colonialism, race, myth, and political awakening. Originally published in 1987, this critically acclaimed novel is the continuation of the story that began in Abeng following Clare Savage, a mixed-race woman who returns to her Jamaican homeland after years away. In this deeply poetic novel, Clare must make sense of her middle-class childhood memories in contrast with another side of Jamaica which she is only now beginning to see: one of extreme poverty. And Jamaica—almost a character in the book—comes to life with its extraordinary beauty, coexisting with deep human tragedy. Through the course of the book, Clare sees the violence that rises out of extreme oppression, the split loyalties of a colonized person, and what it means to be neither white nor Black in that environment. The result is a deeply moving, canonical work.
Twenty years after publishing his groundbreaking "The Spirit and the Flesh," anthropologist Williams teams up with award-winning writer Johnson to produce a work of historical fiction that is striking in its evocation of Navajo philosophy and spirituality.
Get an inside perspective on life as a disabled gay man! Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories reverberates with the sound of “cripgay” voices rising to be heard above the din of indifference and bias, oppression and ignorance. This unique collection of compelling first-person narratives is at once assertive, bold, and groundbreaking, filled with characters—and character. Through the intimacy of one-on-one storytelling, gay men with mobility and neuromuscular disorders, spinal cord injury, deafness, blindness, and AIDS, fight isolation from society—and each other—to establish a public identity and a common culture. Queer Crips features more than 30 first-hand accounts from a variety of perspectives, illuminating the reality of the everyday struggle disabled gay men face in a culture obsessed with conformist good looks. Themes include rejection, love, sex, dating rituals, gaycrip married life, and the profound difference between growing up queer and disabled, and suffering a life-altering injury or illness in adulthood. Co-edited by Bob Guter, creator and editor of the webzine BENT: A Journal of Cripgay Voices, the book includes: two performance pieces from acclaimed author and actor Greg Walloch poetry from Chris Hewitt, Joel S. Riche, Raymond Luczak, Mark Moody, and co-editor John Killacky essays from BENT contributors Blaine Waterman, Raymond J. Aguilera, Danny Kodmur, Thomas Metz, Max Verga, and Eli Clare interviews with community activist Gordon Elkins and Alan Sable, one of the first self-identified gay psychotherapists in the United States and much more! Queer Crips is a forum for neglected cripgay voices speaking words that are candid, edgy, bold, dreamy, challenging, and sexy. The book is essential reading for academics and students working in lesbian and gay studies, and disability studies, and for anyone who's ever visited the place where queerness and disability meet.