In her book Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús traces the transnational experiences of Santería practitioners living primarily in Cuba and the United States. Beliso-De Jesús argues that Santería, as a diasporic religion that emerged in Cuba by way of imperialist and colonialist practices, has been tied to transnational systems of power and exchange since the late-nineteenth century. However, she notes that the majority of studies on Santería have primarily focused on nationally framed issues of Cuban identity and community. Beliso-De Jesús extends this conversation within the recent scholarship by turning her attention to the sensory feelings and embodied knowledge that arise from the movements of travel, tourism, and international politics that surround the religious practices and practitioners of Santería.
Through her study of Santería, Beliso-De Jesús challenges the ways in which animacy and spirituality are often approached from Judeo-Christian religious ontologies. The author also critiques the tendency within the social sciences to frame the model of Christian transubstantiation into self-other, here-there, and earth-otherworld dichotomies (73). Beliso-De Jesús argues that this simplistic interpretation of transubstantiation does not fully capture the realities of experience occurring in transnational spaces of spirituality. In response to this gap in belief scholarship, Beliso-De Jesús introduces the term “copresences,” which she defines as “a multiplicity of being” that is felt, expressed, and manifested through bodily energies, spiritual forces and “diasporic assemblages” (9). In her view, copresences allow for a more complex and nuanced framing of the relationship among transnational religious practice, media, and African diaspora communities. Furthermore, the introduction of copresences into this work de-centers Western perceptions of being by examining Santería through Afro-Cuban ontologies.
Influenced by the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guitarri, Beliso-De Jesús structures her study of the transnational mobilities of Santería as a series of assemblages of the diasporic experience (7-8). These assemblages, held in flux with each other, reveal the tensions of race, gender, and sexuality that exist in and between different diaspora groups, nations, and social classes. She states, “Envisioning scapes and diasporas as assemblages rather than imagined worlds, then allows for fleeting moments in transnational flows of power to the surface” (14). The chapters operate as assemblages, or scapes, which are connected and woven together throughout the book in order to examine the systems of power that affect Santería religious practice, tourism, and national and international mobility.
Chapter 1 uses an analytic of race and class to explore the history and current use of video recordings of Santería rituals practiced across the tightly controlled borders between the US and Cuba. The author suggests that videos “expand copresences’ electrifying relationship with practitioners,” thereby allowing a participation in transnational communication through both spiritual and electronic currents (43). Chapter 2 examines the more tangible pathways of religious experience through contexts of international religious-tourism markets in Cuba. The author shows how various members of the diasporic community embody senses of belonging and marginalization through travel.
In Chapter 3, Beliso-De Jesús discusses Cuba’s position as an authentic site of Africanness in the pan-American landscape by considering how spiritual authenticity is negotiated through constructions of race. In this historically “black place,” religious rituals in the Cuban countryside of Matanzas are seen as more authentic than those in Havana (37). Chapter 4 challenges the privileging of visual culture in academic scholarship by analyzing the distinctions between foreigners and Cubans through Beliso-De Jesús’s creative mapping of smellscapes. Entitled “The Scent of Empire,” this chapter compares the olfactory presences that are manifested in feelings of nationalism and foreignness for Cubans and tourists respectively. This section analyzes the class and racial differences that are evoked in subtle and intangible landscapes throughout Cuba, but especially in Havana. Chapter 5 centers on the varying interpretations by Americans, Cubans, and Africans with regard to women being initiated as members of the ifá tradition within regla ocha practices. This discussion leads to a deeper analysis of the gendering of particular religions, races, and nations, and of how the historical and social perceptions of femininity as a contaminating source affects the daily lives of women and queer members of the Santería community.
Beliso-De Jesús offers a refreshing and innovative approach to the study of Santería. Her work is a valuable resource for folklorists researching belief, religious communities, gender, race and ethnicity, tourism, and diaspora. This book is largely based on ethnographic material collected during the author’s travels as she has observed and participated in religious rituals in Cuba and the United States since 2002. Due to Beliso-De Jesús’s efforts to protect the practice of secrecy that shrouds religious rites, Electric Santería does not present a traditional ethnography of Santería rituals and practices. For the reader unfamiliar with this religion, the lack of detail in the descriptions of Santería rituals and initiations does not lessen the accessibility of the work’s rich contribution to the understanding of transnational Afro-Cuban religious movements. Furthermore, her creation and application of the term copresences opens new possibilities of thinking about written scholarship as a type of “haunting” that influences knowledge production of the past and present (29).
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[Review length: 848 words • Review posted on September 13, 2016]