Ezili's Mirrors

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas and author of Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments ix Bridge. Read This Book Like a Song 1 Introduction. For the Love of Laveau 3 Bridge. A Black Cisfemme Is a Beautiful Thing 29 1. To Transcender Transgender 31 Bridge. Sissy Werk 65 2. Mache Ansanm 67 Bridge. My Femdom, My Love 99 3. Riding the Red 101 Bridge. For the Party Girls 133 4. Its a Party 135 Bridge. BaIa and Marigo 169 Conclusion. Arties's Song 171 Notes 195 Glossary 223 Bibliography 225 Index 241

"Ezili's Mirrors thoroughly and carefully mines the utility and uniqueness of multiple spiritual and thought traditions, aesthetics, and sources of knowledge. . .. Ezili's Mirrors is important because through it Tinsley shows us ways that black femme life and black queer life exists and asserts itself as other than the abject, the undesirable, the inappropriate, and the excessive." - Alexandria Smith (The New Inquiry) "I have longed for a book as daring as Ezili's Mirrors." - Meredith Coleman-Tobias (Reading Religion) "This pathbreaking work prompts Black feminist and queer diaspora scholars to use their academic training not as an endpoint, but as a point of departure, emboldening scholars to turn to whatever sources that are necessary to write books that will sustain alternative forms of knowing under increasing conditions of precarity in Black queer diasporic lives, loves, and labor." - Darius Bost (The Black Scholar) "Once in a great while, a gem of a book comes along. It is not only elegantly written and astutely composed, compellingly and courageously argued, but it also opens up new and generative ways of looking at the African diaspora and the disciplines devoted to its study. I am talking about Tinsley's Ezili's Mirrors. I read the book with intense joy, on many levels: its theoretical polyamory, its dazzling methodology, its engrossing narrations, and the different senses it calls on." - Gloria Wekker (TSQ) "Ezili's Mirrors makes an original contribution to the development of the field of queer black religion and to the ways in which this scholarship has a wider, public impact in the representation and self-understanding of queer-of-color spiritual communities whose members experience lives of constant fragmentation and recomposition daily, globally." - Roberto Strongman (GLQ)