Feminist Spiritualities

Conjuring Resistance in the Afro-Caribbean and Its Diasporas

By Joshua R. Deckman

Subjects: Caribbean Studies, Gender Studies, Black Studies, Spirituality
Series: SUNY series, Afro-Latinx Futures
Hardcover : 9781438493404, 188 pages, July 2023

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Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Spiritual and Emotional Resistance to Empire

1. Sacred Memories: Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos-Febres, and the Politics of Race in Puerto Rico

2. The Path of Erzulie: Love, Vodou, and Counter-Imaginations of Hispaniola

3. Afro-Latina Feminisms: Nuyorican, Domincanyork, and Afro-Latinx Political Resistance

4. The Raw Ones: Ibeyi, Las Krudas CUBENSI, and Pedagogies of Resistance

Conclusion: Conjuring Paths, Points of Departure
Notes
Works Cited
Index

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Explores the feminist spiritual and emotional politics of literary and cultural works by Black Caribbean women.

Description

Feminist Spiritualities aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding Black/Latinx experiences within a critical framework of decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, politicized emotional structures, and anti-imperial politics. Joshua R. Deckman considers literary and cultural productions from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and their diasporas in the United States, exploring epistemic spaces that have historically been marked as irrational and inconsequential for the production of knowledge—including social media posts, song lyrics, public writings, speeches, and personal interviews. Analyzing works by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana Hernández, Ana-Maurine Lara, Elizabeth Acevedo, María Teresa Fernández, Nitty Scott, Lxs Krudxs Cubensi, and Ibeyi, Deckman shows how these authors develop afro-epistemologies grounded in Caribbean feminist spiritualities and manifest a commitment to finding joy and love in difference. Literary, anthropological, and more, Feminist Spiritualities weaves through a series of fields and methodologies in an undisciplined way to contribute new close readings of recent works and fresh assessments of well-known ones.

Joshua R. Deckman is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Stetson University.

Reviews

"Feminist Spiritualities provocatively invites us to sit with the decolonizing potential of Afro‐Caribbean ancestral spiritual practices and how they shape feminist and queer practices of shared love, joy, and pain across difference in the islands and their diasporas. A twist on decolonial thought inspired by the possibilities of other worlds and solidarities emerging from within Afro‐Caribbean creative imaginaries." — Alaí Reyes‐Santos, author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles