Electric Santería

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesus 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.

Aisha Beliso-De Jesus allows us to see the densely intertwined modes of becoming that include the racing, sexing, and engendering of bodies. Electric Santeria is an exciting and timely addition to the series Gender, Theory, and Religion. -- Solimar Otero, author of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, and coeditor of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and African Diasporas An inspiring-even astonishing-piece of anthropological research. -- John L. Jackson Jr., author of Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem A brilliantly coherent and insightful contribution to the way that we think about the complexities and nuances of new transnational formations. This artfully mastered ethnography is bound to become an influential staple for a range of actors: Santeria practitioners, academics, and cultural critics. Not only does it demand from its readership a rethinking of our ontologies of knowing, but it also requires that we take seriously affective practices in clarifying the way we make sense of our world. This is a must read for all! -- Kamari Clarke, University of Pennsylvania Ethnographically rich and theoretically audacious, Beliso-De Jesus's Electric Santeria breathes fresh air into the scholarship on Afro-Cuban ritual praxis. Her principled refusal of an analytic of transcendence, her spirited critique of conventional approaches towards mediation, her focus of the sensorium, and her mobilization of black feminist and queer theory give us a handle on problems that anthropologists of religion and religious studies scholars have yet to pay full attention to. -- Stephan Palmie, author of The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion In this brilliant, theoretically exciting, and innovative ethnography, Beliso-De Jesus explains Santeria in Cuba in terms of a transnational, diasporic geo-ontology. Critiquing the ubiquity of religious universals-based Christian notions of transcendence and transubstantiation, she reveals Santeria's 'trans' as an assemblage of co-presences, in which nationalisms, gender, and sexuality are mediated through sound, image, and sense. Electric Santeria is a new 'classic' for religious studies and for African diaspora studies. -- Inderpal Grewal, Yale University An innovative exploration of a protean and complex religious phenomenon, Electric Santeria presents a powerful challenge to the longstanding dominance of the Abrahamic within anthropological scholarship on religion. Drawing on her own vast ethnographic archive, Beliso-De Jesus carries us along the historical and transnational peregrinations of people, spiritual forces, racial formations, and nationalist projects that together constitute the relational ontology of Santero worlds. This is a work of considerable insight and theoretical daring, a rare accomplishment that deserves to be widely read. -- Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley Electric Santer'ia should be required reading for ethnographers of not only Cuba and African-inspired religious traditions, but any new religious movements that challenge Western theories of being in the world. Nova Religio This book is a major breakthrough in the conceptualization of transnational religious ontologies be they in Cuba or not. American Anthropologist This book is an important contribution to writing stories that are not nationally bounded but also that work to look beyond binary dualisms. Sociology

• Author's Note Preface: Despedidas Acknowledgments Introduction: Transnational Santeria Assemblages 1. Electric Oricha 2. Transnational Caminos 3. Pacts with Darkness 4. Scent of Empire 5. Contaminating Femininities Epilogue: A Death at Dawn Glossary Notes References Index