Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou by Roberto Strongman (review)

Roberto Strongman's Queering Black Atlantic Religions is difficult to assign to a particular genre. At times, it reads as personal narrative, as when the author speaks of his encounters with and impressions of various practitioners of African diasporic religions. On other occasions, the book seems to be a persuasive text designed to portray such faiths as uniquely liberating. In other parts of the work, Strongman spends considerable time examining ethnographic depictions of Vodou, Santería, and Candomblé. Elsewhere he frames his book as a medium for the initiation of readers into otherwise hidden knowledge of these three religions. All of these seemingly disparate strands are bound together by an ethos of literary criticism that relies on a series of photographs, paintings, movies, and novels as the texts it uses to elucidate African diasporic faiths and those who wrote about them. As such, the book is not so much a study of the religions themselves, as might be assumed from its subtitle, or even their practitioners, but primarily an expression of the author's interpretation of how observers have understood and depicted these faiths through queer lenses.

At the heart of Strongman's study is the contention that African diasporic religions are characterized by transcorporeality, which he defines as "the distinctly Afro-diasporic cultural representation of the human psyche as multiple, removable, and external to the body that functions as its receptacle" (2). Trance possession, a common characteristic of such faiths, evidences this mutability when human mediums find their bodies occupied by deities of the opposite gender. Moreover, argues Strongman, experiences of regendering during trance affect the mundane lives of believers as well as popular and scholarly observers of the faiths, rendering transcorporeality "a leading feature of nearly every aspect of Afro-diasporic cultural production" (3). Closely connected to this primary argument are the subsidiary contentions that the religions of Vodou, Santería, and Candomblé are uniquely amenable to those who identify as homosexual or transgender and that queer practitioners are especially qualified for leadership in the faiths. To support his assertions, Strongman draws upon an exceptionally wide range of sources, including, but not limited to, the works of scholars Mimerose Beaubrun, Maya Deren, Hubert Fichte, and Lydia Cabrera; painters Hector Hyppolite and Wifredo Lam; novelists Jorge Amado and Mário de Andrade; photographer Pierre Verger; the film Fresa y Chocolate; and his own observations of and opinions about various sacred events and those who participated in them.

Queering Black Atlantic Religions will prove a difficult read for those not well versed in literary criticism. As is common with such scholarship, its language is dense. Historians, ethnographers, and other non-literary specialists will also likely find themselves confused by Strongman's genre shifts and merging as well as his tendency to interpret the work of social scientists through the lens of art and literature. They will also find themselves uneasy that some of his analyses rely heavily upon his admittedly subjective decoding of artistic productions. In a brief conclusion, entitled "Transcripturality," Strongman helps address the potential for such concerns, however. There he explains that his goal was to produce a work that itself acts as a possessed body, expressing in textual form the lived experience of devotees of African diasporic religions. Although the book can be a bit impenetrable for the uninitiated, its author's grasp of a wide range of sources produced in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and the facility with which he quotes them in the original languages and English translation, is quite impressive.