Circuits of the Sacred

"A critical Bildungsroman, an autoethnography, a biography, and a biomythography, Circuits of the Sacred is seductive in its personal disclosures. Its vulnerability and nakedness lay bare highly personal material that will endear the book to people of color, immigrants, and queer people. Not since the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back have I read a queer narrative that has broken through established genre conventions with such boldness." - Roberto Strongman, author of Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou

“Carlos Ulises Decena’s determination to fè yon rasanblaj situates his prescient body portal in the entrails of methods, practices, and theories confronting blackness as he expertly resensitizes here/there, pain/pleasure, pride/shame, sacred/profane in the Latinx Caribbean. This tour-de-force queer study demands that academics engage with ancestral imperatives---creative, discursive, intellectual, or spiritual. Circuits of the Sacred is both scream and libation, a liturgy for the future, necessary praxis on this long path to liberation.” - Gina Athena Ulysse, Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Beyond the provocation of the book’s title and theoretical framework lies, in moments, a charming memoir chronicling Decena’s auto-ethnographic experience of growing up in a Black Dominican migrant family. . . . Decena’s generational musings on queer life will be of particular interest to readers who value sex-positive ethics regarding HIV awareness and prevention." - James Padilioni, American Religion

"More than memoir, more than monograph, Carlos Ulises Decena’s Circuits of the Sacred boldly undresses dominant preconceptions surrounding queer spiritual and sexual identity. . . . Decena’s unapologetic command of space and attention makes this book a valuable contribution to queer scholarship. The text’s emotional complexity constructs kinetic reckoning and revolution, calling us to (re)shape livable futures." - Marion Eames White, Reading Religion

"Decena’s voice is not one; the orisha speaks through him, as well. The author of the book is possessed. Another way to say this is that Santoría is not an object of study in this book but rather an experience that transforms the knowing subject himself as the knowing subject becomes plural. The book’s form is testament to that transformation and plurality." - Stephanie Clare, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"Decena’s work brings a new world into being by insisting that its conocimiento requires new ways of doing language, new ways of making meaning, and new ways of producing, and using, 'knowledge.'" - Ricardo L. Ortiz, Hispanic Review

"Circuits of the  Sacred creates movements that traverse Afro-Caribbean geographies and diasporas of the queerly sacred and sacredly queer. This powerful study asks the reader to go on a path marked by the Vodou notion of rasanblaj that is rarely charted in studies of Afro-Cuban religions. Decena asks us to take a leap of faith, and it is worth it." - Solimar Otero, New West Indian Guide