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2009-10 Research Associates and Visiting Faculty
Solimar Otero
Visiting
Assistant Professor of
Women's Studies and Afro-Atlantic Religion
Solimar Otero is a Cuban-American and Puerto Rican-American scholar of
Atlantic religions. She is an assistant professor and folklorist in the
Department of English at Louisiana State University. Her interests include
Afro-Caribbean spirituality and Yoruba traditional religion in Cuba,
Nigeria, Puerto Rico, and the United States. She received her PhD in
Folklore and Folk life from the University of Pennsylvania. She has
conducted field work on these topics in Cuba and Nigeria under a Fulbright
Scholar Award.
Her volume, Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, which deals
with Afro-Cuban repatriation to Lagos, Nigeria, is being published by the
University of Rochester Press in their African History and the Diaspora
series, edited by Toyin Falola. Otero also edited a special
edition of Western Folklore (2007) that focuses on Afro-Caribbean
religious culture. Her work appears in the anthology Writing
Of(f) the Hyphen: Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto
Rican Diaspora, edited by Jose L. Torres-Padilla and Carmen H. Rivera.
She also has contributed articles to Africa Today, The Black
Scholar, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Phoebe,
and Atlantic Studies.
Her project for the WSRP, "Coming Home:
Sacred Spaces and Diaspora in Afro-Cuban Women's Religious Culture," deals
with gendered spaces and geographies in the Afro-Cuban religion of Santerķa.
This interdisciplinary work will address two primary issues in the
religious culture: the construction of gendered cartographies and sacred
spaces created by female priests—or santeras— in Cuba, and how these
ritual consecrations perform a portable Cuban identity that can be
perpetuated through religious practice and social performance in
religious diasporas.
Photograph courtesy Solimar Otero.
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