In his multisensory affirmation of Black queer cosmologies, Carlos Ulises Decena mobilizes his personal journey as a working-class queer immigrant scholar to illustrate the transmogrification of Blackness in Afrodiasporic spiritual cultures and sensorial conceptions of the self. Defining “faggotology,” or “pensar maricón,” as a “mystical bottoming” (11) that embraces the liberatory wisdom of hemispheric spiritual knowledge, Decena engages intuitive sites of queer Afro-Caribbean divinity that disavow academic transparency and respectability. Here, he conceives of Blackness as “in transit,” using circuits to observe how Blackness is refracted through “contradictory grids of intelligibility” (6) across physical differences, cultural contexts, and sociopolitical histories. By animating disparate epistemologies, structures of feeling, and tensions that flow between internal and external connection networks, Blackness as a circuit seeks a more nuanced approach to transnational discourses in which “Black” may in fact be a flattening or distorting identity category rather than an opening for subjective, even salacious, permutations. Thus, by cataloging his own fragmented path toward a fuller understanding of his Black queer subjectivity, Decena produces an intergenerational, genre-blurring text that praises the inherent sacredness of daily diasporic life, encouraging readers to name “our lusty, funky, and stank quests to freak through our bodies” (9) and cherish the cosmological revelations that ensue.
Circuits of the Sacred is divided into four parts: its chapters, or “narrative nodes” (7), are spread out nonsequentially in order to activate “conocimiento,” a form of “inarticulable ancestral wisdom” (163n53) that “turn[s] intellectual labor into a mystical quest” (11). In “Part 0: Orígenes (Origins),” Decena lays out the fundamental shape of the text, followed by a narrative homage to his ancestral genealogy via his upbringing in Santo Domingo. “Part I: Caminos” shifts to Decena’s experiences within academic spaces. Chapter 2, “Bridge Crónica: A Triptych, with Elegguá,” performs a ritual tribute to the deity of roads and paths, charting Decena’s own distorted self-actualization as a working-class Afro-Caribbean scholar divorced from his cultural lineage, underscoring the contradictory imbrication of Blackness and faggotology. Chapter 3, “Experiencing the Evidence,” teases out intuition and embodied knowledge through Decena’s titular inversion of historical positivism, establishing faggotology as “an otherwise morphology for being and knowing the divine” (57) that prioritizes the body’s capacity to retain and rupture histories of everyday life.
“Part II: Dos Puentes, Tránsitos” continues to tease out the ineffable, diffractive qualities of faggotology. Chapter 4, “Loving Stones: A Transnational Patakí,” deploys travel narratives to explore transnational forms of Santería through a Marxist analysis of otases, or ritual stones, and their messy relationship with commodity fetishism. Chapter 5, “¡Santo! Repurposed Flesh and the Suspension of the Mirror in Santería Initiation,” features a side-by-side personal narrative structure that juxtaposes a fictionalized account of Decena’s formative years with evocations of his initiation as a Santería priest, further linking the body’s intuitive apprehension of dislocated histories with modes of mystical knowledge.
Finally, “Part III: Traces” puts faggotology into practice, which is where Decena’s methodology most impresses. Chapter 6, “Indecent Conocimientos: A Suite Rasanblaj in Funny Keys,” features several narrative passages embodying an “erotics of intimacy” which “conceives of unexpected sites of pleasure in the body” (127). Here, Decena fully leans into the antirespectability of faggotology, positioning illuminating contemplations of trance possession alongside breathtakingly detailed accounts of sexual encounters with strangers to highlight how intimacies between precarious bodies constitute a critical, and political, form of worship. In “Epístola al Futuro/An Epistle to the Future,” Decena closes with a heartfelt address to his own children that functions “as gospel for the black queer children of the future” (157), recombining ancestral wisdom with the cosmological inheritance of future generations.
Decena’s work will undoubtedly find favor among diasporic scholars of sexuality, religion, and spirituality, though it remains to be seen how Blackness as a circuit will contribute to emerging debates about the implicit anti-Blackness of “Brownness” as an essentialized racial category among Caribbean Latinx groups. Circuits shies away from a deeper analysis of such slippages in Latin American/Dominican national identity; however, Decena’s theorization lends itself to a deconstruction of this obfuscating trend endemic in Latinx studies, more directly critiqued by scholars such as Christopher L. Busey, Carolyn Silva, Laura Grappo, and Ren Ellis Neyra. Describing Blackness “as the cut, wound, and raja with specific historical and geopolitical coordinates on the island of my biological birth” (9), Decena’s text will also appeal to Black and Afro-Latinx studies scholars interested in what Lorgia García Peña terms “the vaivenes [comings and goings] of Black Latinidad in the twenty-first century.”1 Queer studies scholars will similarly appreciate faggotology as an oppositional, if utopic, approach to collective queer self-conception that dwells in performative excess and waste, somewhat akin to what Bobby Benedicto terms “queer of color negativity,” through which one renegotiates “the burden of repairing the very world that demands [their] annihilation.”2
Disability studies scholars will likely be drawn to Decena’s deconstruction of wholeness as an “enclosure” that reduces the body to “an instrument of contact with sentience” (4). Rather than being “en paz conmigo mismo (at peace with myself)” (4), Decena asserts: “I am at peace with being a hole. A black (w)hole” (5), riffing off Evelynn Hammonds’s foundational essay on the absent presence of Black women’s sexuality, though curiously omitting Jennifer C. Nash’s arguably more germane “Black anality” expansion, which centers the anus as “a space of play, pleasure, desire, and delight for black subjects.”3 Considering (anal)ogies abound in Circuits, including Decena’s description of rimming as “the touch of the divine in the gutter—a flower mapped on the asshole one licks” (154), I couldn’t help but wonder what faggotology might have gained from the cosmological valences of a distinctly Black queer anality. Nonetheless, Decena’s strategic methodological openings, as it were, exude a rapturous, sacred vulnerability that effectively undergirds his ritual subversion of heteronormative hegemony.
I have no doubt more bountiful points of departure will emerge among future readers, who will certainly be as provoked and challenged as I was by Decena’s ambitious, at times unwieldy, but largely successful scholarly reckoning with liberatory queer Afro-Latinx and Caribbean futures.
Notes
Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality”; Nash, “Black Anality,” 456.
