“Transcorporeality in Black Atlantic Religions”, a talk with Roberto Strongman

Roberto Strongman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This presentation establishes Transcorporeality as the distinct Afro-Diasporic cultural representation of the human psyche as multiple, removable and external to a body that functions as its receptacle. This unique view of the body, preserved in its most evident form in African religious traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, allows the regendering of the bodies of initiates who are mounted and ridden by deities of a gender different than their own during the ritual ecstasy of trance possession. Through discussions of novels, paintings, films and interviews, the presentation assembles and interprets a representative collection of such transcendental moments in which the commingling of the human and the divine produces subjectivities whose genders are unconstrained by biological sex due to the flexibility that this non-Cartesian corporeal model affords.

Roberto Strongman is LAIS faculty.