Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty

Abstract

Ana-Maurine Lara’s Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty presents a compelling and unique ethnography of queer, Black, and Indigenous people and spiritual practices in the Dominican Republic. The book is based on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists, as well as the author’s engagement with traditional ceremonies and observation of national Catholic celebrations. The activists represent different communities and people on the margins (Black, LGBTI, Indigenous, spiritual practitioners, poor, and/or rural) and mostly at the intersections of two or more. These entanglements offer a complex understanding of Caribbean Black, Indigenous, and queer communities. Lara argues for and uncovers pathways to Black decolonization that built upon an interdependence between queerness and blackness—and what it means to be free—particularly for Black, Indigenous, and queer people. Through personal and poetic narratives and experiences in these communities, Lara theorizes possibilities of freedom through everyday acts of resistance. Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty is not the usual scholarly book because it incorporates creative storytelling and myth creation alongside ethnographic research of various spiritual and activist practices. Lara challenges how scholars write and theorize, in particular for Caribbean and postcolonial scholars and personal as well as political investments in community-based research. Lara affirms Black and Indigenous forms of creation and knowledge production; she demonstrates this through storytelling, ethnography, participatory research, creative non-fiction, poetry, myth-making, and spiritual practice. The book troubles the fields of anthropology and Caribbean and Africana Studies through transdisciplinary approaches to ethnography and an insistent demand for justice and research that is accountable and transgressive. The driving force of the book is a positioning of Black and queer as one (of and in itself), which requires the reader to think deeply about the interconnections between queerness and blackness, freedom and sovereignty. Lara argues that we see and understand these as pivotal to the ongoing and unfinished project of decolonization. In other words, there is no freedom without self-determination and decolonial liberation, and there is no Black freedom without queer freedom. By using a colon in between “queer freedom : black sovereignty,” Lara insists