Sirena Selena vestida de pena: narración histórica, afroespiritualidad y políticas queer

Abstract

In my reading of the acclaimed novel Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000) by Afro-Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres, I consider its fictional construction in close relation to the constitution of a historical archive that speaks of queer women’s of color realities and subjectivities from a trans-Caribbean perspective. After reviewing the novel’s analytical return to formative moments of Puerto Rican and Caribbean modernity, I explore the incision of a collective memory and an affective narration in the construction of histories-otherwise told by communal subjects who share existences with human and non-human beings. By circulating Afro-spiritual ways of doing of a common divine, Sirena and all her living and dead companions, set in motion migratory trajectories and transform senses of the present reality through the erasure of race, class, and sexual hierarchies by means of the conjunction of Afro-spiritual and queer futurities.