Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures. By Solimar Otero

Abstract

Conversations with the dead are par for the course in most African diaspora religious cultures; ancestral consideration, dialogue, and veneration are the prosaic cornerstone of these traditions. Folklorist Solimar Otero invigorates this cosmological truth, inviting her reader to consider how this central idea can be leveraged into hermeneutical savvy, methodological intervention, and ultimately perspectival shift in the study of Afrolatinx religious cultures specifically. How, exactly, does a scholar-practitioner encounter the archives, both material and living, Otero wonders? How does the active participation of both the dead and divinities mediate and change such an engagement? These are the central concerns that Otero answers in her 2020 monograph, Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures. Through privileging unorthodox annals, Otero empowers unique readings of Afrolatinx religious cultures and pioneers a novel method for apprehending their emic knowledges. Otero looks to the scholar-practitioner identity itself to inform how invested learners should interpret the documents, gestures, oratorical, and sensorial insights of Afrolatinx religious cultures in the study’s purview: Candomblé, Espiritismo, Lucumí, Palo and Vodou, among others. More than the re-memory that animates so much of Otero’s case studies, she intends to “suggest new ways of traversing temporality that are connected to Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ projects of futurity that rely on rethinking the agents of history through enacted practice” (12). Her project, then, eclipses the standard historical, ethnographic, and grounded theoretical analytics that inform contemporary social scientific and humanistic studies of Afrolatinx and broader Africana religious cultures. Instead, Archives of Conjure wonders how “Afrolatinx nonmaterial or occasionally material beings, like egun (the dead) and orichas (deities), become active agents in the world through rituals, archives, and the creation of material culture” (3). Otero curates motley stories—cultural productions ranging from autobiographical vignettes to robust inquiries into fiction—to reveal these beings’ atemporal, creative strategies.