Alysa Ghose

My work is focused in Cuba on questions of race, gender, kinship, sexuality, and nation. My first book project: 'Mothers, Spirits, and Hustlers: Gender, Race and Making Do in Cuban Espiritismo' examines Espiritismo Cruzado, a religious tradition of African inspiration, predicated on communication with spirits of the dead. I show how relationships and communities (made up of both the living and the dead) are fostered and how they help practitioners get by in the everyday hustle of making do in post-Soviet, post-Fidel Havana. I endeavour to address the interrelated material and affective concerns of my interlocutors on their terms. My forthcoming research examines reproduction and citizenship to make sense of how women and families are navigating the country’s political and economic situation through the lens of community building-as-spirituality. I examine Cuba as an island attempting to stay afloat as a socialist welfare state in a sea of late capitalism, considering the legacies of the US Trump administration’s policies, COVID-19, and the largescale economic crisis which have exacerbated existing difficulties of the longstanding global embargo. This project looks at questions of motherhood as it is configured and experienced in dialogue with post-plantation legacies in the Caribbean and Americas more broadly. I have also conducted ethnographic research in other Latin American contexts concerning spirituality, reproductive health, gender and race.