Spirit Work, Intellectual Pursuits: Seeking Black Kinship, Space, and Collectivity After Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

What possibilities exist for belonging outside of the framework of the nation state? For those of us living and working in the US, for those of us living and working in Caribbean islands, and for all of us tethered multiply to the spatialities and logics of island and continent, how do we think about our relationship to land and community when the frameworks offered over centuries of colonialism are bereft? This roundtable invites a group of Black diasporic writers in the circum-Caribbean region working across hybrid and multiple modalities–scholarship, journalism, fiction, poetry–to reflect on how African-descended spiritualities forecast possibilities for kinship across space and difference. The roundtable is composed of a group of interdisciplinary thinkers, each of whom has a particular and distinct relationship to African-descended spiritual traditions. Some identify as working priests; others as newly drawn to the traditions via research; others as beginning to perceive buried lineage connections to spiritual practices. What each presenter seeks to explore and share in this roundtable is a series of personal, ceremonial, spiritual and professional inquiries about how Caribbean spiritualities provide frameworks for thinking beyond the (post)imperial nation states we have inherited, and especially at a moment of increasing island precarity and fascistic repression. We need community now more than ever–sturdy, reciprocal, nimble. How might we discern modes for creating these communities inspired by communal practices that have long had to think and work beyond the topography of land and sea, the limiting ideologies and exclusions of state bordercraft?

Nadia Ellis (UC Berkeley) will share some of the questions and possibilities raised from work in progress on the Jamaican Kumina religion, which she only began to explore as a researcher once she left the island of her birth. Alaí Reyes-Santos (U Oregon) and Ana-Maurine Lara (U Oregon) will discuss their project travelling with a traditional canoe crafted by hand in the Dominican Republic. Working with U.S. Caribbean diasporic communities they seek to recover and revitalize Afro-indigenous community, knowledge and practices through ceremony. Tianna Bruno (UC, Berkeley) will reflect on how her spiritual inquiries have opened the path for her forthcoming work re-imagining Black kinship across port towns in the circum-Caribbean region, including the U.S. South and Puerto Rico. Sandra Rodriguez Cotto, renowned and award winning Puerto Rican journalist and political analyst will serve as commentator. This interactive roundtable will explore what connections we find in spirit work that the nation state cannot replicate, and invite attendees to share with us how their own experiences of spirit work may inform intellectual and deeply personal pursuits of Black kinship and collective survival as the Empire falls. We will discuss the challenges and possibilities of enacting diasporic frameworks inspired by histories of spirit work whilst continuing to function within logics of secular nationalism and willed forgetfulness of these histories. And we will connect our thinking to our respective work in monographs-in-progress, fiction, a story-map, and radio and newspaper journalism.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Sandra Rodriguez Cotto

Panelists

• Ana M Lara, University of Oregon

• Nadia Ellis, University of California Berkeley

• Alai Reyes-Santos, University of Oregon

• Tianna Bruno, University of California Berkeley

Biographical Information

Sandra Rodríguez Cotto is an award-winning investigative journalist, blogger, and radio host with over 30 years of experience in all types of media covering Puerto Rico, and with extensive reporting on the Caribbean, the United States and in Latin America. She hosts her syndicated daily radio show “En Blanco y Negro con Sandra” (In Black & White with Sandra) where she presents investigative reports and provides news and political analysis of current issues. She is a weekly op-ed columnist and as regular contributor to Ey Boricua news site and other international news organizations, and has her own blog, videoblog and podcast of over 10 years. In 2019 she received the prestigious Bolívar Pagán National Literature and Journalism Award granted by the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature, for her opinion columns published in the digital newspaper NotiCel, and in her book "En Blanco y Negro con Sandra". She has won over 20 investigative awards by the Overseas Press Club, Journalists Association of Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce, Manufacturer’s Association, the House of Representatives, and other organizations. She is one of the few reporters in Puerto Rico to receive the OPC’s Eddie Lopez Award the highest honor in Puerto Rico for a distinguished career in journalism and public service. Sandra holds a bachelor's degree in Journalism and Communication, Latin American Literature and Caribbean History with a concentration in Cuba from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. A former president of the Overseas Press Club of Puerto Rico and board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in the United States, she was also a founding member of the Center for Freedom of the Press in Puerto Rico and has been active at the Puerto Rico Journalist Association. She is also active with Afro Puerto Rican and African American organizations such as Creative Media Justice and Cumbre de Afrodescendencia.

Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos serves as a Professor of Practice at U of Oregon's School of Law as well as Director of the Mellon Foundation-funded ($4.5 million) PNW Just Futures Institute for Climate and Racial Justice; and Director of the Water Equity Fund ($1.5 million funded by an Oregon state budget allocation) at JFI/Climate Solutions Center. An award-winning teacher, her Ted talk “Building Intercultural Communities” is used in higher ed and popular education to initiate guidelines for dialogue across difference. She is also the founder of ACC, a BIPOC-led consulting firm that facilitates organizational transformations and community engagement in the non-profit sector, government, higher ed, arts and cultural initiatives, emergency preparedness and response, and social and environmental justice organizations. ACC is currently a named partner in the Environmental Justice Technical Assistance Center funded by the Environmental Protection Agency to serve Region 10. Dr. Reyes-Santos currently serves in Oregon's Racial Justice Council's Environmental Equity Committee providing recommendations to the Office of the Governor. The community-action research project she co-founded and co-led for four years as a member of Oregon Water Futures Collaborative contributes to the articulation of a water justice agenda in the state and nationwide. After supporting a $530 million water package, OWF moved to its second outreach phase in 2022 and completed a Water Justice Policy Framework; the framework informed the Drought Package passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2023, and continues to shape a cutting-edge Water Justice Leadership Institute led by Verde. The innovative Water Justice Network emerging from within OWF's advocacy centers people of color, women, and queer leadership in the water sector. The digital humanities site The Healers Project: Decolonizing Knowledge Within AfroIndigenous traditions-co-authored by Dr. Reyes-Santos with Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara and U of Oregon Libraries-showcases interviews with healers and traditional ecological knowledge keepers, ethnobotanical guides, multimedia essays, and curriculum and bibliographical resources.

Ana-Maurine Lara is the William and Susan Piché Faculty Fellow, a national award-winning poet, novelist, performance artist and scholar who teaches as an associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. Dr. Lara is the author of: Erzulie’s Skirt (RedBone Press, 2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (KRK Ediciones, 2011), Watermarks and Tree Rings (Tanama Press, 2011) Kohnjehr Woman (RedBone Press, 2017), Cantos (letterpress, limited edition 2015), and Sum of Parts (Tanama Press, 2019). Her academic books include: Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (SUNY Press, 2020) and Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic (Rutgers University Press, 2021). Lara’s work focuses on questions of Black and Indigenous people and freedom. She has been published in literary journals (Sable LitMag,Transitions Literary Journal), scholarly journals (Small Axe, Bilingual Revue, Sargasso, Feminist Review) and numerous anthologies, as a scholar and as a creative writer. Her collaborative digital humanities project titled The Healers Project recently received an honorary mention from the Latin American Studies Association and is receiving current funding through the Mellon Foundation. She has received writing awards for her creative and scholarly work, including from the Lambda Literary Foundation, PEN Northwest, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Association of Queer Anthropologists, and the Dominican-Haiti section of the Latin American Studies Association among others. In 2021, she was granted the University of Oregon Outstanding Early Career Award.

Tianna Bruno is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black geographies, critical environmental justice, political ecology, and critical physical geography. Through her work, she aims to foreground Black life, sense of place, and relationships to the environment within spaces of present-day environmental injustice. Her research also highlights the mutual experiences of degradation and survival between subaltern communities and their surrounding ecologies through the integration of Black geographies and critical physical geography, specifically analyzing trees. This research is currently focused on Texas, and will soon expand to various sites across the Black diaspora. My work has been published in Local Environment, Professional Geographer, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Nadia Ellis is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English, University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora(link is external) (Duke, 2015; Honorable Mention, William Sanders Scarborough Prize, MLA), explores forms of black belonging animated by queer utopian desire and diasporic aesthetics. It is a project built from a long-standing interest in following trajectories of literary cultures from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States. The work also developed through a preoccupation with several intersections, including those between queerness and diaspora, imperial identification and colonial resistance, performance and theory. Published essays explore her work on queer and black performance, sexuality and the archive, and popular music, including Jamaican dancehall and New Orleans bounce. She teaches courses on a range of topics within her fields and regularly offers classes connecting literary cultures to questions of the city, migration, and sexuality and gender. She has received the University of California's Distinguished Teaching Award (2020) and the university's American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award (2016).