Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty

Ana-Maurine Lara is Assistant Professor in the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Erzulie's Skirt and Kohnjehr Woman.

"Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty is a book about connections that reveals the massive web tying all forms of life and their struggles together. The innovation of Lara's study lies in both its content and its form, making it a valuable addition to ongoing conversations about the ways that coloniality in the Caribbean affects groups that are putatively separated in their needs and identities." — Palimpsest"Queer Freedom encourages Black, Queer, and Dominican studies scholars to become undisciplined, centering transnational, decolonial, Indigenous, and Black feminist thought. Lara inspires us to get clear with spirit and practice an ethics of care and love to achieve decolonial futures of freedom in collaboration with our interlocutors." — Transforming Anthropology"The book is itself a sacred offering to the ancestral, spiritual, and physical beings that have contested the oppressive legacies of colonialism, racism, and homophobia. The author advocates for systemic change that will end the anguish of centuries of colonial and imperial doctrine that have imprisoned the imaginations and desires of Caribbean peoples. It is a phenomenological study written in poetic, provocative, powerful prose … This reflexive, theoretically engaging study is a must read for scholars of the African diaspora and specialists in gender and sexuality studies, especially in the Caribbean." — CHOICE"This book is a necessary and powerful contribution to the fields of gender and sexuality studies, Caribbean studies, black queer studies, and anthropology, among others. It is a refreshing intervention—dynamic, unique, and beautifully written—into how we write about, create, and theorize the Caribbean and postcolonial world. The book defies the conventions of Western forms of knowledge production. It fully embraces black and indigenous forms of creation and knowledge production—and the author demonstrates this through storytelling, ethnography, participatory research, creative nonfiction, poetry, mythmaking, and spiritual practice. This book and its author demand justice." — Angelique V. Nixon, author of Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture

• Acknowledgmentsopening ceremonyaltars-puntosbody-landswater-memorieswarclosing ceremonyBibliographyIndex