Nontranscendental Transnationalism

In the United States the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería summons images of witchcraft, animal sacrifice, and ritual possession, all enveloped in an exotic sheen. Santería, like other racialized religions and spiritual practices, is often neglected by the theological and theoretical engagements embedded in “world religions,” whose transnational appeal is attributed to their capacity for transcendental—and therefore universal—truths. Aisha M. Beliso–De Jesús’s Electric Santería counters these assumptions by insisting that Santería’s transnational worlds enrich scholarly understandings of religious practice and mediation. Vigorously theoretical and ethnographically rich, Electric Santería draws attention to Santería’s affective embodiments of the divine, complicating studies of transnational religion that often start from an implicitly Christian conceptualization of the transcendental experience. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted primarily in Cuba and the United States, Electric Santería is also remarkable for its sophisticated analysis of how race, gender, and sexuality operate across uneven spiritual terrains. Beliso–De Jesús does not offer a...