Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean

a book launch and conversation with Carlos Decena and Gayatri Gopinath, Erica Rand, & Gina Athena Ulysse

April 27, 2023, Thursday, 6 pm ET
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor

In Circuits of the Sacred, Decena models what he calls a faggotology—the erotic in the divine as found in the disreputable and the excessive—as foundational to queer black critical and expressive praxis of the future. Drawing on theoretical analysis, memoir, creative writing, and ethnography of Santería/Lucumí in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Decena moves between languages, locations, pronouns, and genres to map the itineraries of Blackness as a “circuit,” a multipronged and multisensorial field. A feminist pilgrimage and extended conversation with the dead, Decena’s study is a provocative work that transforms the academic monograph into a gathering of stories, theoretical innovation, and expressive praxis to channel voices, ancestors, deities, theorists, artists, and spirits from the vantage point of radical feminism and queer-of-color thinking.

This event is organized by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, and co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) and the Latinx Project.

For more information, please contact the NYU Hemispheric Institute.