About

Elizabeth Pérez is an ethnographer and historian specializing in Afro-Diasporic and Latin American religions. Her research focuses on Cuban Lucumí (Santería) and other belief systems that have developed in the Americas, including Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Vodou, Puerto Rican Espiritismo, and Venezuelan Maria Lionza. Her interests extend to the poetics and politics of Caribbean altar displays, the construction of historical memory through ritual performance, and women’s religious leadership across the Afro-Atlantic world. Pérez investigates the social life of ephemera such as chromolithographs of Black Madonnas to explore human sociality, labor, and desire. Her first book, 'Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions,' published in 2016 by NYU Press, draws on years of participant observation in a Chicago-based community dedicated to Afro-Caribbean traditions. The book emphasizes the significance of routines related to food preparation and storytelling as vital rituals for Black Atlantic religions. Pérez’s ongoing research examines the challenges faced by transgender and transsexual individuals as religious actors in the United States, exploring how gender and sexuality intersect with Afro-Diasporic traditions and how marginalized individuals negotiate their identities within these religious contexts. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including the Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize and the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Anthropology
• Literature
• Religious studies
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• Art
• History
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Art history
• Theology
• Social psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• Style and Substance: Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha’s <i>Vodou en Vogue</i>

  Religious Studies Review · 2025-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  VODOU EN VOGUE: FASHIONING BLACK DIVINITIES IN HAITI AND THE UNITED STATES. By Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 240. Paperback, $24.95. “Asho mi? Asho mi?” After seizing the body of a young Black man in spirit possession, the deity Yemayá repeated this phrase plaintively, with the thin hands of her “mount” splayed across her slim chest. He had come to the site of this drum ritual in September 2024 wearing a white T-shirt and a kufi, a brimless embroidered cap of the type sometimes worn by Muslim men for their daily prayers. He had cast off the kufi and thrown it into the crowd during the last decisive throes of possession, so when Yemayá—the resplendent orisha of the oceans, motherhood, and maternal labor—took over his body, she felt distinctly underdressed. “Asho mi” means “my clothes” in the Lucumí ritual language, an atonal version of Yorùbá that took hold in Cuba as the tongue in which to pray to the West African gods called orishas. In asking for her clothes, Yemayá was expressing not only her desire to be arrayed in her favorite colors and soft fabrics, but also to give her material with which to work. She would use her skirts to heal, dry tears, soak up sweat, and punctuate her scolding of ill-mannered attendees. When dancing, she would achieve the sartorial effects for which she is renowned, swirling the blue handkerchiefs pinned to her waist while whirling in place to create the illusion of ocean waves.1 Since reading Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha’s Vodou en Vogue, I have become more attentive to the ways that practitioners of Lucumí and other Afro-Diasporic religions use clothes, and how what they wear makes initiates who they are. On that September afternoon, I had the privilege of standing in the small conference room where three mounts possessed by the orishas changed into outfits trimmed with metallic braid and embellished with contrasting fabric panels, jewels, and sequins. While being dressed by Lucumí initiates, each orisha waited patiently, like a client being fitted for a suit by a tailor. Practitioners strapped the orishas’ satin caps to the heads of their mounts, and the crowns puffed upwards as if filled with the primordial energy of aché radiating from their scalps. Once kitted out, the orishas began admiring their finery, then turned their attention to it again when dispensing advice and dancing with practitioners. For example, the other person mounted by Yemayá at the event was adorned in the red and blue of the warrior “path” (or manifestation) called Ogunte. While counseling one attendee, she pointed to a large scarlet cabochon sewn into her skirt and repeatedly emphasized the stone’s color to drive home a point that she was taking pains to make. It helped get her message across despite her limitations as a Lucumí-only speaker in a sea of devotees chatting in English and Spanish. Nwokocha’s multisited ethnography has prompted me to focus more intently on the nuances of such interactions and the circumstances surrounding the design of sacred vestments. In the case of the Yemayá asking for “asho mi,” the young man who incorporated her hailed from Chicago, and the seamstress for the outfit was an elder in the community I have called Ilé Laroye in my work.2 She was tasked with fashioning an ensemble that would be comfortable enough to keep on for several hours of strenuous physical activity while conforming to Lucumí precedents for dressing the orishas in the Cuban “creole style,” including long cuffed sleeves and high collars (Brown 2003, 224). Perhaps more importantly, it would have to facilitate the visual and kinesthetic transformation of a slender, muscular cisgender man into an orisha customarily depicted as a heavyset cisgender woman. The seamstress’ elegant turquoise, aquamarine, and silver creation did not disappoint, and the volume she gave the tunic at the waist compensated for its wearer’s lack of voluptuosity. The ingenious design broadcast her skill and spread her fame on the West Coast, much like Nwokocha’s main interlocutor, the innovative designer Mambo Maude, relies on practitioners’ “Vodou hopping” to garner followers and transnational admirers. Vodou en Vogue documents the intricacies of Mambo Maude’s lived experience and shows that attiring herself for her patron spirit, or lwa, in anticipation of possession opened the door to styling her entire community. Until the publication of Vodou en Vogue, the resources on sacred couture in Afro-Diasporic traditions had been few but rich. I confess that as an early reader of the manuscript, I wanted to see greater engagement with such underappreciated gems as Ysamur Flores-Peña and Roberta J. Evanchuk’s 1994 Santería Garments and Altars: Speaking Without a Voice. I was trained as a historian of religion and tend to harbor a desire to see the patterns across Black Atlantic traditions recognized for what they have historically afforded to practitioners. Among the first noteworthy studies was Mary Ann Clark’s 1999 dissertation, “Asho Orisha (Clothing of the Orisha): Material Culture as Religious Expression in Santería,” but it went unpublished; Maria Elena Molinet’s Vestimenta ritual tradicional de la Santería cubana (2007) won the Premio Catauro in 2008, awarded by the Fundación Fernando Ortiz, but it is not widely known and remains untranslated. The works of Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara (2005) and David H. Brown (2003) cannot be recommended highly enough to those interested in ritual vestments as worn publicly and for different initiatory stages in Candomblé and Lucumí. Scholarship on the construction of Afro-Diasporic altars can shed significant light on ceremonial dress as well, especially with regard to subterranean histories of labor and worship (Drewal and Mason 1998). After picking up Vodou en Vogue, it soon became clear that Nwokocha was up to something much more original and more deeply Nwokochan—to coin a term—than the comparative study I had in mind. Vodou en Vogue is an urgent statement about the state of Haitian and Black American kinship today—not yesterday, not elsewhere—that might well have had its impact diluted with reference to alternate pasts and places. Nwokocha knows that, in a religious community led by Haitian women, a headwrap isn’t just a headwrap; its shape and tightness are indices of Africanity and belonging. Her exploration of “Blan” (non-Haitians) as a category highlights the tensions that can arise between Black and white practitioners even in a cohesive and harmonious house of worship. The nested hierarchies within Lucumí have been discussed in a number of notable studies (Palmié 2013; Beliso De Jesús 2015; Carr 2016; Tsang 2023). In Afro-Diasporic traditions more generally, certain aspects of one’s identity (such as race, ethnicity, gender, and class) can prevent some members from accessing the full extent of fellowship and authority that might be available to others. The fact that Black practitioners are sometimes uncomfortable with and suspicious of non-Black folks in sacred spaces might be a hard truth to swallow, but Nwokocha offers it up with a chaser of humor and verve. Throughout, the “emotional labor” that Mambo Maude expends is at the forefront, and Nwokocha goes hard in her love for Haiti. On the day that I received Vodou en Vogue in the mail, I found myself reading the preface out loud over the phone to my closest friend, a Cuban racial justice facilitator, LGBTQ rights activist, and cultural organizer who had just been initiated into Lucumí. “I have grown weary of arguing for Haiti’s wholeness,” Nwokocha writes, and her weariness has a genealogy, echoing Langston Hughes’ “Weary Blues” and Chanequa Walker-Barnes’ viral blog post “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman.”3 Nwokocha’s exhaustion derives in part from the knowledge that clichés about Vodou are not merely the result of ignorance but of anti-Blackness, which complicates the accurate portrayal of—among many other things—creative genius and sensual pleasure. The dignity that Nwokocha accords to her interlocutors is a piece with her Black feminist framework, which prioritizes the intersectionality of those gendered as Black and racialized as women, a locution that indicates the complexity of embodiment for Nwokocha’s main informants. The importance of Nwokocha’s scholarly intervention should be felt in not only Religious Studies and Anthropology, but also the public discourses in which stereotypes of Haitians remain acceptable—forty years after the smears of the AIDS epidemic (Fouron 2013). During the fall of 2024, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance spread libelous rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets, and the overdetermined specter of “voodoo” sacrifice soon joined the array of caricatures reinscribed in the “news” and on social media (Boaz 2023; Kaisary 2024). Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana tweeted, “These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters …” (Duster 2024). Although “vudu” has been commodified to the point of kitsch and the term is invoked to sell any number of products from microbrews to hot sauce, Haitians themselves are seldom accorded the respect they deserve. Nwokocha’s attention to the occasionally fraught relationships between Haitians and Blan is not an airing of “dirty laundry”—a phrase that surfaces in countless studies about gender and sexuality in the Black Church—but a serious attempt to grapple with what it means to practice Vodou in the contemporary world. In this sense, Vodou en Vogue can be interpreted as an example of the “negotiatory labor” that Nwokocha coins and theorizes, inspired in part by Judith Casselberry’s (2017) identification of distinctive varieties of religious work. Offering a faithful account of present-day Vodouisants means confronting the histories of colonialism and violence from which Vodou itself emerged. Another set of difficult truths arrives in disclosures about the erotic relationships between Vodouisants and the spirits guiding them. Behind closed doors, after the initiations and drum rituals are over, practitioners of Black Atlantic traditions talk about the erotic dreams they have had about the spirits (at home and in sacred spaces), wondering about the boundaries of what is acceptable to say. Likely due to the “politics of respectability” that have circumscribed representations of Afro-Diasporic religious communities, these conversations have not left much of a trace in the scholarly literature (Higginbotham 1993). We can look to J. Lorand Matory (2003) as a pioneer in telling aloud the “secrets scholars keep,” and Carlos Ulises Decena’s (2023) Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean goes yet further in breaking taboos around the divine and erotic. Nwokocha also says heretofore unsayable things about practitioners’ intimacy with their spirits. But whereas Decena leans into the ways that human sexuality can move one closer to religious ecstasy, Nwokocha respectfully illuminates the marital conventions that structure relationships between human and spiritual spouses—for example, the obligation to juggle simultaneous conjugal commitments. She avoids sensationalizing the physicality of mystical marriages and writes with delicacy about their preparation and consummation, even if her interlocutors sometimes share recollections that are graphic in nature. To censor out their fleshliness and viscerality would be to distort the ethnographic record. Nwokocha departs full-throatedly from the hushed tones and vague allusions in which such matters have customarily been broached. Frank conversations about sexuality, eros, and the Black Church have been ongoing for some time (Pinn and Hopkins 2004; Manigault-Bryant 2016a, 2016b; Moultrie 2017; Sorett 2022; Bryant 2023), and Vodou en Vogue joins Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s (2018) Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders and Roberto Strongman’s (2019) Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou in challenging popular pieties about Afro-Diasporic religiosity. Yet even as a non-initiate, Nwokocha comes close to advocating for the view of sex as sacred held by practitioners. For her interlocutors, romantic unions and domestic partnerships are not merely prototypes for their relationships with the spirits; they are imperfect institutional conduits for the boundless love that Black divinities have for those betrothed to them. Nwokocha credits her queerness with offering an entry point into the non-heteronormative dimensions of spiritual marriages and the inner lives of LGBTQ practitioners, just as her Nigerian Igbo heritage at times facilitates her insights into racial, ethnic, and transnational Diasporic dynamics. In the section entitled, “A Femme Wink: Clocking Queer Black Women through Spiritual Fashion,” she (122) tells of her flirtation with a masculine-of-center lesbian in the context of a Vodou ceremony. Although the wink has been operationalized in classics by Clifford Geertz (1973) and Erving Goffman (1963), here it is the researcher doing the winking. In Nwokocha’s reflections on the scene, analytic rigor coincides with methodological daring. Her positionality grants her the perspective to arrive at the coinage of “spiritual vogue,” the wide future applicability of which hinges on its acknowledgment of a ritual’s audience as a major factor in its felicity (or failure) as a performance. In the past, Dantò had shown me favor. Not. This. Time. She glared at me and pulled out her dagger, aiming it at my chest … Three things went through my mind: (1) Fuck!, (2) the dagger was real, and it hurt when she pressed the sharpened point against my skin, dispelling my suspicions that some ritual items used during ceremonies were fake, and (3) I had messed up. She lingered for several long seconds, staring at me, and then ran the dagger across my lips in the shape of a cross. “Pa pale,” she said, Haitian Kreyòl for “don’t speak.” The demand made me anxious about my work, and I sought clarification from other practitioners and scholars who told me I needed to be careful about the way I spoke to members of Manbo Maude’s temple and to consider how to tailor my ethnographic strategies to suit the specific communities I engaged. (21)

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• To Have Been a  “Science”: Theorizing Afro-Cuban Religious Knowledges through &lt;em&gt;Critical Approaches to Science and Religion&lt;/em&gt;

  Zygon® · 2025-11-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A subjective response to ‘transitional phenomena’ and case study of chinoiseries in “Afro-Cuban” religions

  Religion · 2025-01-12 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Unique, Divine, Unrepeatable”

  QTR : · 2024-11-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The late Bishop S. F. Makalani-MaHee (1972–2017) was a minister, activist, actor/singer, composer, and spoken word artist. His essays, songs, poetry, plays, and sermons reflect his “Blackpentecostal” and Southern Baptist upbringing as well as his embrace of liberation theology, womanism, and Black feminist thought. This article analyzes his only published collection of poems, Don’t!, as a profound repertoire and theological manifesto with the aid of his autobiographical writings, performances, and eponymous archive housed at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives. Don’t! contests patriarchal, cisgender-sexist constructions of masculinity by paying homage to Black grandmothers, mothers, femmes, and cisgender (or “nontrans”) “sister friends.” This article argues that Don’t! is a declaration of his woman-centered theorization of transmasculinity and his queer/trans Christology, which should be brought into conversation with texts in the womanist canon. The article further contends that Don’t! enriches the Black trans Christian archive and disrupts the “whitewashed” master narratives of LGBTQ experience.

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• Memoria colectiva en el relato de pobladores de San Luis.

  Momboy -. · 2024-07-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  La historia regional y local de las comunidades o pueblos nos aportan conocimientos, saberes y prácticas sociales para la construcción de un discurso histórico e historiográfico, que nos permite rastrear la génesis de las relaciones que los pobladores han desarrollado para hacer sus modos de vida, expresado en lo histórico sociocultural, económico y político. El propósito de la investigación es reconstruir la memoria colectiva, a partir de las voces silenciadas o excluidas de los distintos actores, en la comunidad de San Luís, del municipio Mercedes Díaz del estado Trujillo. El procedimiento metodológico a utilizar es la narrativa lo que permite conocer las vivencias y/o experiencias personales y colectivas. El tipo de investigación es narrativa que versa sobre una postura epistémica en la construcción retrospectiva que un individuo hace de la vida de otros o que un sujeto elabora de sí mismo, Connelly y Clandinin (1995) citado en Creswell, J. (2013). La investigación toma relevancia al considerar la experiencia, las vivencias, relatos de los pobladores que facilitó la comprensión de significantes socioculturales como tradición, valores, participación, organización, independencia, construidos por cada uno de sus integrantes como parte de una historia viva, diversa y compleja. Igualmente, se apoya en los aportes teóricos de Medina, A.; Bello; Giddens, A. Sutton, P. En conclusión, el rescate de la memoria colectiva, se revitaliza el sentido de pertenencia de los pobladores de San Luis por su historia, por su diversidad sociocultural presente en formas de convivencia, adoptadas por el colectivo en esta localidad,que ha dejado arraigado valores sociales tales como: participación, unidad, solidaridad,organización, autonomía.

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• Sorry cites: The (necro) politics of citation in the anthropology of religion

  Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses · 2024-02-19 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, I analyze the under-citation of Black and/or Latine scholars—especially those located disciplinarily within religious studies—in the anthropology of religion. I draw from my own experience as an editorial assistant at History of Religions, manuscript reviewer, and Latine ethnographer of religion to speculate on the reasons why researchers might refuse to cite them, preferring either to neglect their contributions or to “plagnore” them, to borrow a term coined by legal scholar, law professor, and activist Lolita Buckner Inniss. I then expand on Chicana and Boricua feminist and race scholar Nichole Margarita Garcia’s theorization of under-citation as “spirit-murdering.” I invoke philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics to make the case that citation is a matter of life and death for Black and Latine women scholars in particular. In the absence of institutional accountability for editors and authors, I conclude with recommendations for the diversification of our scholarship and syllabi.

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• Unpeeling the banana dance: The quare fugitivity of Joséphine Baker

  The Journal of American Culture · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Gut

  2022 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology
  • Aesthetics

  If the head is religion, the gut is magic. Taking up this provocation, this Element delves into the digestive system within transnational Afro-Diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Lucumí (also called Santería). It draws from the ethnographic and archival record to probe the abdomen as a vital zone of sensory perception, amplified in countless divination verses, myths, rituals, and recipes for ethnomedical remedies. Provincializing the brain as only one locus of reason, it seeks to expand the notion of 'mind' and expose the anti-Blackness that still prevents Black Atlantic knowledges from being accepted as such. The Element examines gut feelings, knowledge, and beings in the belly; African precedents for the Afro-Diasporic gut-brain axis; post-sacrificial offerings in racist fantasy and everyday reality; and the strong stomachs and intestinal fortitude of religious ancestors. It concludes with a reflection on kinship and the spilling of guts in kitchenspaces.

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• “I Got Voodoo, I Got Hoodoo”: Ethnography and Its Objects in Disney’s<i>the Princess and the Frog</i>

  Material Religion · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology
  • Sociology

  Since the 2009 release of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, critiques from within religious studies have focused on the role of its villain, Dr. Facilier, and its stereotypical distortions of Haitian Vodou. These are but a fraction of the allusions made to Black Atlantic traditions, however; several scenes contain artifacts pulled from the material cultures of Afro-Brazilian Umbanda and Quimbanda, as well as Afro-Cuban Abakuá, Palo Mayombe, and Lucumí. I demonstrate that filmmakers not only accessed a broader range of ethnographically-informed sources than has been acknowledged, but also engaged in their own ethnographic data collection with Vodou and “Yorùbá” priestess Ava Kay Jones. As a result, the film reproduces an extensively-documented discourse promulgated by practitioners of Afro-Diasporic religions concerning the (im)morality of magic. The film even follows Jones and the foundational scholarly literature on Black Atlantic traditions in furnishing characters with ethnically differentiated props and dwellings, coded as either proximate (Black and West African) or Other (Caribbean and Central African). I argue that filmmakers erred primarily in harboring a Protestant normative bias and depicting things endowed with agency according to the logic of the fetish. I conclude by proposing strategies for more ethically viable future representation of Black Atlantic traditions.

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• The Black Atlantic Metaphysics of Azealia Banks: Brujx Womanism at the Kongo Crossroads

  Hypatia · 2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Controversial Harlem-born rapper/singer, songwriter, and provocateuse Azealia Banks is the most (in)famous, vocal, and visible proponent of Black Atlantic traditions in recent times—making a critical reckoning well overdue. I begin here by tracing Banks's engagement with Afro-Diasporic religions (including Caribbean Espiritismo, Afro-Cuban Lucumí, and Dominican “21 Divisions”) as a trajectory from vamp to bruja [witch]/ santera to mayombera . A review of Banks's public statements reveals her growing commitment to championing “so-called voodoo” and urging other African Americans to do so as well. I argue that the release of Beyoncé's Lemonade in 2016 catalyzed Banks's advocacy for Kongo-inspired Palo Mayombe, long overshadowed by Yorùbá-based orisha worship. I further demonstrate that Banks's espousal of Palo Mayombe has been bound up with her identity as a Womanist and dark-skinned, cisgender femme fatale . More than a political program, however, Banks's discursive constructions amount to a Black Atlantic metaphysics. Drawing on Irene Lara's formulation of “bruja positionalities,” I propose that the theoretical scaffolding for her metaphysics should be designated Brujx Womanism. Missteps notwithstanding, Banks emerges as a metaphysician, aspiring to repair Black bodies by re-membering Kongo traditions. In closing, I suggest that Banks's Brujx Womanism may contribute to the conceptualization of Conjure Feminism in four crucial respects.

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Frequent coauthors

• Elisha Barbara

  Princeton University

  25 shared

• Sylviane A. Diouf

  Brown University

  25 shared

• Sylvester A. Johnson

  25 shared

• Afe Adogame

  25 shared

• Paul E. Johnson

  25 shared

• Judith Weisenfeld

  Princeton University

  25 shared

• Edward E. Curtis

  16 shared

• Virginia Tech

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Finalist for the 2025 Alta California Chapbook Prize hosted…
• Finalist for the inaugural (2024) Cardinal Poetry Prize spon…
• Winner of the 2022 LGBTQ-RAN (Religious Archives Network) Ed…
• WINNER – 2024 Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize on Vernacul…
• WINNER – 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of R…