Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

discusses

Electric Santería:
Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion

This event includes a book signing

Date

Oct
2
Friday
October 2, 2015
3:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research welcome AISHA M. BELISO-DE JESÚS, an associate professor of African American religions at Harvard Divinity School, for a discussion of her book Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.

Santería is an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion long stigmatized as witchcraft and often dismissed as superstition, yet its spirit- and possession-based practices are rapidly winning adherents across the world. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús introduces the term "copresence" to capture the current transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism.

Drawing on eight years of ethnographic research in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, Beliso-De Jesús traces the phenomenon of copresence in the lives of Santería practitioners, mapping its emergence in transnational places and historical moments and its ritual negotiation of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and religious travel. Santería's spirits, deities, and practitioners allow digital technologies to be used in new ways, inciting unique encounters through video and other media. Doing away with traditional perceptions of Santería as a static, localized practice or as part of a mythologized "past," this book emphasizes the religion's dynamic circulations and calls for nontranscendental understandings of religious transnationalisms.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is associate professor of African American religions at Harvard Divinity School. A cultural and social anthropologist, she studies media, circulation, and religious travel of African diaspora religions from a transnational feminist approach.

Photo Credit: Justin Knight

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Event Co-Sponsor(s)

The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research: http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/

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