Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty

Ana-Maurine Lara

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438481104, 9781438481098
• eBook ISBN: 9781438481111
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

Evocative, innovative ethnography of spiritual practices and forms of queer, black, and indigenous life in the Dominican Republic.

2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Winner of the 2021 Gregory Bateson Book Prize presented by the Society for Cultural Anthropology

Winner of the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize presented by the Association for Queer Anthropology

Theoretically wide-ranging and deeply personal and poetic, Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is based on more than three years of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic. Ana-Maurine Lara draws on her engagement in traditional ceremonies, observations of national Catholic celebrations, and interviews with activists from peasant, feminist, and LGBT communities to reframe contemporary conversations about queerness and blackness. The result is a rich ethnography of the ways criollo spiritual practices challenge gender and racial binaries and manifest what Lara characterizes as a shared desire for decolonization.

Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is also a ceremonial ofrenda, or offering, in its own right. At its heart is a fundamental question: How can we enable "queer : black" life in all its forms, and what would it mean to be "free : sovereign" in the twenty-first century? Calling on the reader to join her in exploring possible answers, Lara maintains that the analogy between these terms-queerness and blackness, freedom and sovereignty-is necessarily incomplete and unresolved, to be determined only by ongoing processes of embodied, relational knowledge production. Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty thus follows figures such as Sylvia Wynter, María Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, Mark Rifkin, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde in working to theorize a potential roadmap to decolonization.

INDEX

adodi, 39, 40–42, 117

Afro-descent, 1, 8, 10n40; erasure of, 93; as queer, 103; recognition of, 135

Afro-Dominicanness, 55

Afrofuturism, 15

Agüita de Liborio, 97–102, 144, 148; Catholic Church seizure of, 101–2; as nepantla, 98

alakuata, 39, 40–42

Alexander, M. Jacqui, 3; on the spirit, 4–5

Allen, Paula Gunn, 3

alma, 6; human being-ness and, 18

altars-puntos, 6, 21–22, 26–27; in ceremonies, 46–47; Christian coloniality and, 57–58; dismantling of, 143–45; dispossession of, 135; freedom and, 126; greeting of, 30, 34, 35, 100–101; sovereignty and, 126; space-time, transformation of, 29–30

Anaisa, 36–37, 42–45

anthropology, 25; speculative, 24–25; violence of, 65n13

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 3, 67

Apter, Andrew, 127n31

aquí, 20, 29, 37–38, 126, 137

arrivants, 8–9, 11, 66–67

arrivant states, 8–12, 85; Black death and, 54; Christian coloniality and, 15; Christian colonial violence and, 12; Dominican Republic as, 11n44, 13–14, 32, 66, 126; Indigenous extinction and, 67n; mestizaje and, 31–32; political favors in, 76–77; sovereignty of, 9n35

atabales, 14, 54, 55, 57

Atabales Gran Poder de Dios, 109, 141

Báez, Josefina, 136–37

Balaguer, Joaquin, 74n39, 77, 142n2

Barrick Gold, 88–89, 90, 104, 148

Batista, Celsa Albert, 2

Black nationalism, 17

blackness, 15, 111–12; assimilation and, 14; blood logics and, 95; in Dominican Republic, 15; embodiment of, 111; erasure of, 93–94; futurity and, 16; incommensurability of, 115; indigeneity and, 66; progress and, 16; queer, 94–95; queerness and, 3n6–7, 15, 54n26, 55, 66–68, 132; resistance and, 14; woven density of, 33, 106; zambo consciousness and, 94

blanqueamiento, 66

blood logics: of Christian coloniality, 11, 32; queer blackness and, 95; racial hier...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Opening ceremony
• Altars-puntos
• Body-lands
• Water-memories
• War
• Closing ceremony
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover