Daria Trentini - Böcker

At Ansha's takes the reader inside the spirit mosque of a female healer in Nampula, northern Mozambique. It is here that Ansha, a Makonde spirit healer, heals the resisting ailments of her patients, discloses pieces of her story of affliction and healing, and engages the world outside her mosque. We come to know Ansha's experiences as revolutionary and migrant, her religious trajectories, family, the healers who cured her, the spirits who possessed her, and her declining health. We follow Ansha's shifts in her life and work in the mosque as these intersect with the visible and invisible borders of Mozambique and of its fraught history. Confronting events in her life and in the mosque between 2009 and 2016, Ansha invites us to make meaning with her, as we sit in her mosque, and engage with her family, spirits, friends, patients, and world.

At Ansha's takes the reader inside the spirit mosque of a female healer in Nampula, northern Mozambique. It is here that Ansha, a Makonde spirit healer, heals the resisting ailments of her patients, discloses pieces of her story of affliction and healing, and engages the world outside her mosque. We come to know Ansha's experiences as revolutionary and migrant, her religious trajectories, family, the healers who cured her, the spirits who possessed her, and her declining health. We follow Ansha's shifts in her life and work in the mosque as these intersect with the visible and invisible borders of Mozambique and of its fraught history. Confronting events in her life and in the mosque between 2009 and 2016, Ansha invites us to make meaning with her, as we sit in her mosque, and engage with her family, spirits, friends, patients, and world.

Postcolonial Mozambique decriminalized homosexual acts in 2015. This legal reform was not a response to litigation or public pressure, but came from a parliamentary initiative and lobbying by a few organizations. Subsequent public opinion polls show that Mozambique is an outlier in Africa in its relatively tolerant behaviors and attitudes toward non-heterosexual relationships. What are the cultural and historical specificities toward gender and sexual dissidence in Mozambique that might explain its distinctive path, and what can we learn from them? Queer Mozambique provides a lively response to these questions.Contributors employ different modes and styles ranging from photographs to storytelling to text interpretation to tell stories of Mozambique's distinctive cultures of sexual and gender dissent and fluidity, from the South African mine compounds of the late nineteenth century to the current LGBTIQ+ movement and the formation of new sexual and gender identities, such as those of the manas trans women.The first book in English on queer issues in a Portuguese-speaking African country, Queer Mozambique not only assembles and interprets empirical evidence for the Anglophone reader, but also brings new debates and theories from the Global South. It aims at a truly global dialogue between international and Mozambican scholars of queer studies.