Posted on July 17, 2024 in Interviews
This inaugural TIE Talks interview features Elena Guzman, Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. In the Q&A, Elena discusses what led to her research interests in Black ritual performance across the Caribbean and the African Diaspora and her work as an artist and filmmaker. She also chats about the intersections between the creative arts and scholarship, her upcoming title on Black Spiritual Borderlands, and the mission behind her co-founded feminist filmmaking collective Ethnocine.
I am an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and The Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. The path that led me here is a winding one that I was guided through by my ancestors. My interests began as an undergraduate at Hunter College. As an Africana Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Minor, I got the chance to take phenomenal classes that explored Afro-Latinidad and the Caribbean. It was here I began to do research on Bomba, an Afro-Puerto Rican performance that includes dance and drumming. The seeds of my work were planted here because this helped me learn more about myself, my history, myself as an Afro Puerto Rican. Living in New York in places like Flatbush and Fordham, I saw overlapping and pan-Caribbean performances firsthand and I wanted to use the tools of anthropology to understand pan-Caribbean identity through performance.
This led me to grad school where I was pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at Cornell University. With many shifts and changes I decided to do my fieldwork on the border of Haiti and the Dominican to explore Pan-Caribbean identity through performance. My research focused on cross-border performances between the two nations and the alternative narratives that were offered. It was here that my work in Black ritual performance came into focus. I worked extensively with a Rara group in Anse-à-Pitres, Haiti called Feeling Rara. Rara is a yearly parading performance tradition that begins on Lent all the way until Easter Sunday. Haitian Vodou is a critical part of this performance. I considered the way performers were using Vodou and ritual to create alternative realities for themselves. It was here the seeds for my interest in the power of ritual performance were planted.
My work today brings together all the paths of my journey as I explore Black Ritual performance across the Caribbean and the African Diaspora and the role it plays in creative alternative realities and landscapes of liberation. This research has aligned with my own spiritual journey in Puerto Rican Espiritismo and the Yoruban influenced religion known as La Regla Osha. Both my personal experience and my journey to this point deeply inform my work and the way I engage in knowledge creation.
I have always been an artist. From the early moments in childhood when my mother taught me how to crochet to my teenage years where I majored in fashion design and sewing to my times in college where I wrote secret poems in my notebook to my time in graduate school when I picked up a camera hoping to tell stories. This journey made me realize how art has its own theory and praxis. When I make a film, each frame, angle, and movement is informed by a theoretical orientation, whether explicit or not. For example, in my film, Smile4Kime, I used extreme and intimate close-up shots during some of the interviews. This was influenced by the work of Edouard Glissant and his recognition of the critical space of gesture and other nonverbal forms of language that feature prominently in African diasporic cultures. These gestures hold layers of meaning so the close-up shots were meant to focus on the gestures and moments of the unsaid.
Film has become a critical part of my practice in addition to photography and illustration. When writing, I see these forms of creativity as sentences combined to be read and understood. This is particularly important when doing research in African Diaspora Religions. So much of religion is ethereal, ephemeral, and metaphysical. Each medium has limitations in capturing the multilayered aspects of ritual. For this reason, I use various mediums along with writing to present various forms of knowledge.
Ethnocine is a collective I co-founded during my years in graduate school along with my friends. Through our work with Ethnocine and other collectives such as Rhiza, we wanted to create spaces that embraced the radical potential of feminist knowledge making and collaboration. As academics, these venues became important spaces for us to bridge the gap between academia and the broader filmmaking world. We wanted our interventions to not only happen in research papers and conference rooms, but also with artists and activists. The podcast was one of the ways we wanted to reach this larger audience. Inspired by the notion of Bad Feminist by Dr. Roxane Gay, we spoke to feminist filmmakers to discuss the successes and failures of feminist filmmaking. Ethnocine is a way for us to collaborate and experiment with our work as scholars and artists. This has included collaborative zines, co-written experimental pieces, installations, and events amongst other things.
Ethnocine, in many ways, was a reaction to the colonial history and remnants of Anthropology, including visual anthropology, that my collective members and I were being taught. We wanted a supportive environment to learn about filmmaking and have a supportive community in thinking about how to address these colonial practices. We sat through countless hours of meetings and retreats coming up with our core values and goals, the things that tied our practices together, and the values we hoped to strive towards. Even though we are all located in different places with different experiences and goals, what bound us was our commitment to intersectional feminist and decolonial practice. What this meant for us was supporting each other’s work, offering feedback, being in conversation with filmmakers outside of academia, creating opportunities for other feminist filmmakers, and collaborating with artists and activists.
I started this film with my friend Kimberly in 2016. We wanted to make a film about Black women’s mental health because it was a narrative that was rarely seen in film. The film intensified the bond we had with each other as we laughed, cried, and made plans to make a difference with it. Through our deep friendship we were able to collaborate and show intimate spheres of Kime’s life. Her bluntness, her humor, the profound thoughts she shared on camera, and the intensity of the emotions were all a product of our relationship to each other.
I didn’t mean to make this film about grief and friendship after death. I wanted to make a film about mental health. But after Kime passed away in 2019, the shape and meaning of the film drastically shifted. Then I thought back to Kime’s original goals for this film, which were to show our deep friendship and have the film help and inspire others who may be struggling. The film is an unapologetic foray into the taboo topics of depression, suicide, and suicidal ideation. It is told through the lens of Kime and I’s friendship through different times and spaces.
The film uses animation and other experimental filmmaking techniques to tell a new story. The process included filming new scenes that featured me and working with amazing animators. Animation helped bring the story to life while also allowing us to explore the spiritual aspects of the film.
What this film offers that a research paper cannot is an affective environment. I call this film a living altar to Kime, in which the audience is asked to bear witness but also to bring their own pain and loss to the table in order to collectively heal. This is why I see it as a powerful tool to use in community and educational settings because it allows us to have important conversations at an affective level that engages our mind, body, and spirit. The sensory levels of the film charge it with emotional and spiritual experiences that are difficult to replicate in a research paper. Its goals are also different in that its primary purpose is collectivity and conversation while a research paper’s goal might be for theoretical or methodological knowledge and conversation. Both have an important place which is why I also published an article on the method of feminist sensory ethnography with my fellow Ethnocine co-founder and colleague Emily Hong, in which we talk about our own practice of feminist filmmaking.
Chimera Geographies: Black Spiritual Borderland Performances of the Caribbean is an interdisciplinary monograph that explores the way Black women, non-binary, and gender queer people through the Caribbean and its diaspora use spiritual and ritual performance within African Diasporic Religions, to forge interstitial geographies of the Caribbean and African Diaspora, or what I call Black Spiritual Borderlands. These Black queer religious geographies demonstrate how marginalized genders of the African diaspora negotiate and experience place through Black Atlantic ritual and forge spaces of Black queer belonging. With Chimera Geographies, I aim to create a multimedia and transdisciplinary ethnography of diaspora that showcases the varied experiences, expressions, and locations of the African diaspora with a particular focus on Black women, trans, queer, and nonbinary ritual performers.
The work of Chimera Geographies is to foreground spiritual borderlands of the Caribbean and African Diaspora. In doing so it brings together different African diasporic traditions and religions (ATRs) to understand the geographies that are forged when we stich together overlapping spaces and place making created through Black diasporic religious and ritual practices. It is an intentional stitching together of disparate yet deeply connected geographies, places, and spaces that can only be seen through a critical reimagining of maps of diaspora.
I engage in critical ethnography, visual arts, visual analysis, and critical theory, to explore the vernacular, performative, and ephemeral mappings of the Caribbean. Chimera Geographies stiches together a series of stories; polyrhythmic narratives that draw from practitioners, artists, and Spirit. These stories when read together offer parallel and contrasting experiences of African diasporic religious practices throughout the Caribbean. Visual and humanistic anthropology privilege sensory, visual, and sonic forms such as songs, riddles, and other poetic forms particularly prevalent in African diaspora religion and spirituality. Autoethnography allows me to foreground my own experience as an Afro-Puerto Rican woman who was raised and comes from various African diaspora spiritualities and religion. By creating both written and visual components in Chimera Geographies, my goal is to create a multimedia project that illustrates in multiple ways how borderlands spaces forged through spiritual and ritual performance are critical geographies within the African diaspora that offer queer and feminist articulations of diaspora.
A core practice in my work is the practice of visualizing knowledge. In other words, how might one use other creative mediums to relay the information of the knowledge the scholar is engaging with. This not only includes visual formats like photography and film but also sonic, olfactory, tactile, and other mediums. I would encourage people to imagine their scholarship and theories in other forms. You don’t necessarily have to be great at drawing (I’m not) or creating art. There are so many creative formats that one can learn. For example, in my class Visualizing Border/lands that I taught as a postdoc at Haverford College, students were asked to use 3D printers to create artistic maps influenced by any reading we did in class.
One student created a map of the United States with the constitution engraved across the map and a pink border that represented the 100 mile border zone in which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have the right to violate a persons 4th amendment rights because of its proximity to a land, ocean, or air based border. This 100-mile border zone includes major cities like New York, DC, Los Angeles, and all of Florida in which people’s 4th amendment rights can be revoked in the name of border security. This is one of many amazing examples where students sought to visualize their knowledge in material ways. This assignment pushed people out of their comfort zones and asked them to use a creative medium to create knowledge.
After challenging yourself to explore knowledge in other forms, my advice from there is that once you choose a medium or mediums, dedicate yourself to the craft of the artform and skill building. Technique is just as critical as theory. By bringing these two together, we can create powerful art that teaches and acts as a form of knowledge making.
Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and is now an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her previous positions have included a postdoctoral fellowship at Haverford College and a Research Associate fellowship at Harvard University with the Women’s Studies and Religion Program in the Divinity School. She is currently writing her book manuscript tentatively titled, Chimera Geographies: Spiritual Borderlands of the Afro-Caribbean, which focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religions to forge geographies that counter landscapes of oppression. As an educator, she teaches Black feminism, performance, feminist filmmaking, Black cinema, autoethnography, border/land studies, and visual anthropology.
In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a filmmaker whose work explores the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health. Her work as a filmmaker has been supported by PBS, Black Public Media, the Independent Public Media Foundation, and the Scribe Foundation amongst others.
This interview was conducted by Choice’s digital media producer Sabrina Cofer.
This interview feature invites academics, librarians, teaching faculty, and higher education stakeholders to discuss their latest projects and research. Spotlighting both early and late career researchers, TIE Talks aims to sit down with fascinating individuals whose engaging and informative work inspires others in their fields and intersects with DEIA topics.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.
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