Some religions of the Black Atlantic have long been noted for their numbers of openly queer practitioners and for the spectacular (and spectacularized) gender expansiveness of their embodied spirits, who “mount” human practitioners across gender lines. The intersection of queerness and Afro-diasporic religions has been taken up by scholars and artists across the diaspora, but Roberto Strongman's Queering Black Atlantic Religions is the first comparative theory of queerness across three Black Atlantic religions first practiced in Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil. His work addresses the transatlantic circulation of these religions in text and art as well as their unique production of “subjectivities whose gender is not dictated by biological sex” (3). Throughout the book, Strongman uses the leitmotif of the cashew nut, which sits small and removable upon a large and fleshy fruit, as a metaphor for an African phenomenology in which gender and the other trappings of human selfhood are...

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