Undisciplined Encounters presents

 

   

Aisha Beliso DeJesús

Professor of African American Religions Harvard Divinity School

in conversation with

Ashon Crawley

Assistant Professor , Department of Ethnic Studies

Amalia L. Cabezas Associate Professor, Department of Media and Cultural Studies

Wednesday, October 21, 2015 / 12:00NOON-2:00 PM / 1111 INTS

http://english.ucr.edu

Free and open to public / Lunch will be served

Sponsored by the Department of English at UC Riverside

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. 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, Aisha 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. "In this brilliant, theoretically exciting and innovative ethnography, Beliso-De Jesús explains Santería in Cuba in terms of a transnational, diasporic geo-ontology. Critiquing the ubiquity of religious universals based on Christian notions of transcendence and transubstantiation, she reveals Santería's "trans" as an assemblage of co-presences, in which nationalisms, gender, and sexuality are mediated through sound, image and sense. Electric Santería is a new "classic" for religious studies and for African diaspora studies." — Inderpal Grewal, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Anthropology, and American Studies at Yale University