Archives of Conjure

Solimar Otero's latest book is not an easy one to read, even for scholars of Cuba and Brazil like myself.It is dense, weaves ethnography with literary and queer theory, and proposes novel terms that echo with postcolonial, post-scholarship scholarship.But the term "archives of conjure" itself evokes something that all scholars who have worked in the Afro-Latin world will at once recognize: that materiality matters, be it an archive, or an etching, or written transcripts of spiritual ceremonies, or forgotten field notes, or an inspired beaded or sewn piece of art.This is nothing new.The dead, the deities, are active agents in the world.They cannot possibly be reduced to mental representations, or even figments of social or historical memory.They exist as potent forces that impel and co-create material and human realities, futurities; they are not the past.But Otero produces something more, in my opinion, than an ethnography of Cuban religious aesthetics.The value of this book is in pointing out what lies at the margins, out of the official transcripts, ... what is only alluded to, what is not classifiable, what is only gleaned or available through gossip, or dreams, ... what sits outside the norm of scholarship with its claims to knowledge.This is the space of the "waters," Yemayá, Ochún, the two deities associated with salt and sweet water respectively, as well as Cuban Mama Chola and other figures "dangerous to the establishment and continuation of patriarchal, heteronormative, and dyadic racial orders" (p.109).In this "space outside space," so to speak, Otero intimately explores the ways and fruits of flows.This is not a comfortable fluidity-conceptually, socially, historically-and it is not meant to be.It implies all manner of awkward, even heretical transgressions; it implies embracing forbidden, and to some, disdained, spaces, entities, emotions, and characteristics.This is the space where Otero excels.The book is divided into four chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion.The first chapter, "Residual Transcriptions," explores the temporalities of materialities, stitching connections between spheres of the living and the dead, through the traces of spirits in misas (rituals for the dead) in Havana, and of the "unfinished stories" (p.41) of both Ruth Landes in Brazil and Lydia Cabrera in Cuba.These examples lend themselves to an idea of the slow and steady accrual of stories, advice, and spiritual connections that are on the sidelines but that signal the need for "further work" (p.41).Otero shows that "encoded information" and "auxiliary notations" are far from superficial imperfections to mediumistic or scholarly work, but central.In "Crossings," she hypothesizes that Spiritism's doctrine of transmigration-reincarnationprofoundly influenced Fernando Ortiz, Cuba's foremost scholar, in his narrative

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