Queering Black Atlantic Religions

<div>In <i>Queering Black Atlantic Religions</i> Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou Cuban Lucumí/Santería and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche soul and gender as multiple removable and external to the body.</div>