Criminal Spirit: Formations Of Race And Religion In The Americas

dc.contributor.advisorEmily Wilson
dc.contributor.authorDe Lima, Lucas
dc.date2023-05-18T01:11:59.000
dc.date.accessioned2023-05-22T17:59:58Z
dc.date.available2024-01-20T00:00:00Z
dc.date.copyright2021-08-31T20:20:00-07:00
dc.date.issued2020-01-01
dc.date.submitted2021-08-31T03:50:43-07:00
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation examines how understandings of spirit possession across the Americas mark secular modernity’s racial limits. I argue that the criminalization of possession religions such as Candomblé and Santería solidified racial/religious classification in post-abolition Brazil and Cuba. By codifying rivaling cosmologies and the fear of Blackness, antispiritism encapsulated hemispheric racial imaginaries. Forged against the permeability and unfreedom of Black bodies/spirits, the nation-state hinged on a bounded model of personhood. Producing transcendental whiteness vis-à-vis corporeal Blackness, the Western genealogy of spirit possession shapes the ways white-authored texts encode race. From eugenics to the celebratory ethos of hybridity, racial discourses uphold hierarchy even as they idealize miscegenation in the 1920s, invoking a utopian alternative to segregation in the US. To interrogate this construction of racial paradise and its quasi-secular underpinnings, I turn to Black and brown actors who take up queer, feminist, and Afro-diasporic aesthetics of the sacred. Analyzing medical literature, literary and sociological texts, and visual art from the 1920s to the contemporary era, I situate possession religions as an epistemological nexus between the US and Latin America. By activating spirit knowledges, writers and artists such as Adão Ventura and Ana Mendieta navigate a raced sense of time and space beyond Enlightenment thought.
dc.description.degreeDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.format.extent175 p.
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.urihttps://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/31099
dc.languageen
dc.legacy.articleid5804
dc.legacy.fulltexturlhttps://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5804&context=edissertations&unstamped=1
dc.provenanceReceived from ProQuest
dc.rightsLucas de Lima
dc.source.issue4018
dc.source.journalPublicly Accessible Penn Dissertations
dc.source.statuspublished
dc.subject.otherBlackness
dc.subject.otherBrazil
dc.subject.otherCuba
dc.subject.otherrace
dc.subject.otherspirit possession
dc.subject.otherwhiteness
dc.subject.otherAfrican American Studies
dc.subject.otherLatin American Languages and Societies
dc.subject.otherLatin American Literature
dc.subject.otherLatin American Studies
dc.titleCriminal Spirit: Formations Of Race And Religion In The Americas
dc.typeDissertation/Thesis
digcom.date.embargo2024-01-20T00:00:00-08:00
digcom.identifieredissertations/4018
digcom.identifier.contextkey24594816
digcom.identifier.submissionpathedissertations/4018
digcom.typedissertation
dspace.entity.typePublication
upenn.graduate.groupComparative Literature and Literary Theory
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