Content area
Full Text
Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018 (ISBN: 9780822370307)
Ezili's Mirrors is undoubtedly a destabilizing book in the most ravishing sense of the word. In the tradition of “scholarly anarchy” epitomized by personalities like Henry Louis Gates, LaWanda Stallings, and Kelly Hayes (Gates 1988/2014; Stallings 2007; Hayes 2011),1 Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's research is about black Atlantic expressions of female gender, sexuality, and pleasure exploding traditional Western approaches to queer and Africana studies alike. Rather than offering canonical analyses on the performativity of identity in Butlerian terms (Butler 1993), Tinsley produces reflections on nonnormative racial and gender performances in the circum-Caribbean world by way of turning to Haitian lwa Ezili as the mythological “prism” (4) through which individuals understand themselves and share their creative visions of gender and sexuality.2 Within the radically fluid realm of Haitian Vodou, the rich pantheon of Ezili's heterogeneous manifestations “maps and mirrors queer femininity and womanness” (16) in multiple, imaginative ways. Although “artistically, gloriously feminine, [in fact] Ezili also quite spectacularly explodes gender binaries” (16), and coalesces onto herself a plethora of compelling, yet seemingly contrasting, desires that defy the Western praxis of looking at the different modes of (self-) presentation and articulation of pleasure as forms of deviance. The quintessential manifestations of eros, Ezili's avatars—and the countless realms of literature and popular culture they inhabit—provide Tinsley with a submerged epistemological archive of creative genders and femininities that reveals the potential of diaspora spirituality to meet the need for imagination that black feminist theorizing advocates. As the author explains in the final part of her work:
[E]ngaging Ezili as a mode of theorizing means embracing theoretical polyamory. Like most scholars, I was raised to be academically monogamous: to be “married to” a single coherent subject, “faithful to” a line of theorizing. . . . I tried to open my conceptual relationship here. A philosophy as well as a practice, theoretical polyamory encourages movement between different modes of theorizing: music videos, popular songs, dance, film, erotica, speculative fiction, all married into one theorizing enterprise—all accorded as much explanatory power as academic prose to make sense of black queer lives. (172)
If it feels challenging to firmly grasp the markedly diverse and dynamic...