On Monday, November 4th, the department hosted "Transcorporeality in Black Atlantic Religions,” a talk with Professor Roberto Strongman. Professor Strongman 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. The talk presented data and analysis from his text, Queering Black Atlantic Religions (Duke University Press, 2019).
