Solimar Otero: 2024-2025 Vincent G. Harding Scholar Lecturer
April 8 | April 8 - April 8 MDT
“Defiant Presences: The Inspired Seascapes of Afro-Cuban Divinities, Saints, and Ancestors”
With Solimar Otero
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 – 5:00 to 6:30 p.m.
Iliff School of Theology | Shattuck Hall
Register Here
We are pleased to announce Solimar Otero as the 2024-2025 Vincent G. Harding Scholar Lecturer.
The sea serves as an epistemological orientation for understanding Afro-Cuban religious traditions that access divinities and the dead to reinforce group solidarity and produce healing.
This lecture will explore how spirit mediums and entities create historical, cultural, and ritual intersections that elucidate an ongoing worlding that carries potent political strategies for sustenance through an enactment of the waters, especially the ocean. In particular, this presentation looks at synergies between bodily acts like the singing of the song “Mamá Francisca,” the drawing of Palo signatures for kalunga (the sea of the dead), and altar creation in honor of Yemayá.
The result is a complex and fluid understanding of spiritual practices and relationships that resist flattening and slip through taxonomic rendering. Further, by continually accessing afterlives that are porous and action-oriented, communities create spatial and temporal conduits between the living and the dead that are full of a radical social purpose.
About the Speaker
Solimar Otero is the Director of the Latino Studies Program, and Professor of Folklore and Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also the editor of the Journal of Folklore Research. Her research centers on how gender and race shape Afro-Caribbean spirituality and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, performance, literature, and ethnography.
Otero is a Folklore Fellow of the American Folklore Society, and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. She has also received a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund grant, a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program, and a Fulbright award.
She is the author of Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (Columbia University Press 2020), which won the 2021 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions. She is also the author of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, (University of Rochester Press, 2010); co-editor of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas (SUNY Press 2013); Theorizing Folklore from the Margins: Critical and Ethical Approaches (Indiana University Press, 2021); Eshu Elegba’s Crossroads: Transcultural Creativity in the Works of Femi Euba (Routledge 2025); and Emerging Perspectives in the Study of Folklore and Performance (Indiana University Press 2025).