Chimera Geographies: Black Spiritual Borderland Performances of the Caribbean

Harvard Divinity School

In this project, Elena Guzman explored the way Black women and non-binary people through the Caribbean and its diaspora use spiritual and ritual performance within African Diasporic Religions, including Santeria, Haitian Vodou, Puerto Rican Espiritismo, 21 Divisions, and Obeah, as a means to forge interstitial geographies of the African diaspora. Elena Guzman is an Afro-Boricua filmmaker, educator, and scholar raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University and is an Assistant Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her manuscript, "Chimera Geographies: Black Feminist Borderland Performances," focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religion as a means to forge Black feminist borderlands through spiritual crossings. Her work has been published in Feminist Anthropology, NACLA, and Cultural Anthropology’s Screening Room. This event took place October 31, 2023. For more information: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/home Full transcript here: https://hds.harvard.edu/news/video/2023/10/31/chimera-geographies-black-spiritual-borderland-performances-caribbean