Criminal Spirit: Formations Of Race And Religion In The Americas
dc.contributor.advisor | Emily Wilson | |
dc.contributor.author | De Lima, Lucas | |
dc.date | 2023-05-18T01:11:59.000 | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2023-05-22T17:59:58Z | |
dc.date.available | 2024-01-20T00:00:00Z | |
dc.date.copyright | 2021-08-31T20:20:00-07:00 | |
dc.date.issued | 2020-01-01 | |
dc.date.submitted | 2021-08-31T03:50:43-07:00 | |
dc.description.abstract | This 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.degree | Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) | |
dc.format.extent | 175 p. | |
dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/31099 | |
dc.language | en | |
dc.legacy.articleid | 5804 | |
dc.legacy.fulltexturl | https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5804&context=edissertations&unstamped=1 | |
dc.provenance | Received from ProQuest | |
dc.rights | Lucas de Lima | |
dc.source.issue | 4018 | |
dc.source.journal | Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations | |
dc.source.status | published | |
dc.subject.other | Blackness | |
dc.subject.other | Brazil | |
dc.subject.other | Cuba | |
dc.subject.other | race | |
dc.subject.other | spirit possession | |
dc.subject.other | whiteness | |
dc.subject.other | African American Studies | |
dc.subject.other | Latin American Languages and Societies | |
dc.subject.other | Latin American Literature | |
dc.subject.other | Latin American Studies | |
dc.title | Criminal Spirit: Formations Of Race And Religion In The Americas | |
dc.type | Dissertation/Thesis | |
digcom.date.embargo | 2024-01-20T00:00:00-08:00 | |
digcom.identifier | edissertations/4018 | |
digcom.identifier.contextkey | 24594816 | |
digcom.identifier.submissionpath | edissertations/4018 | |
digcom.type | dissertation | |
dspace.entity.type | Publication | |
upenn.graduate.group | Comparative Literature and Literary Theory |
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