Session Abstract

Since the publication of Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Beacon Press, 1989), historians have turned a critical yet sympathetic eye to the modern religion that is based on the belief that certain individuals can communicate with the spirits of the deceased.  Recent studies of Spiritualism and Spiritism (Spiritualism’s European counterpart, based on the writings of French educator Allan Kardec) have eschewed a skeptical view that might dismiss these movements as frivolous, anti-rational, and thus anti-modern, examining instead their impact on a wide range of social and political identities and issues.  Spanish espiritismo in particular circulated via colonial routes to every corner of the globe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and historians have demonstrated the ways in which the movement betokened an occult dimension of empire while offering a new vehicle for articulating resistance to colonial rule and giving voice to incipient nationalisms.  Yet the questions underlying such scholarship—What is the place of spirits in the making of history?  What kinds of archives exist in words spoken by the dead?—push historical methodology to its limits, and many of us working on the topic have found ourselves turning to the epistemological stances of our colleagues in other fields such as anthropology. 

This panel engages the AHA meeting theme of “History and the Other Disciplines” by examining Spiritism, a topic that, like many others in the history of religions, arguably demands a variety of methodological approaches in order to fully understand its historical impact.  The panelists represent the fields of history, anthropology, and Spanish literary studies, and are some of the best interpreters of Spiritism as it took root and flourished in Spain, Catalonia, and former Spanish colonies.  Gerard Horta frames our discussion by introducing what appears to be the fundamental paradox of Spiritism as a quintessentially modern phenomenon.  Drawing from extensive research on Spiritist organizations in Catalonia from the 1860s to the end of the Spanish Civil War, Horta demonstrates the ways in which Catalan Spiritists fully participated in collective actions that advocated for the transformation of the established social and political order.  The literary scholar Wadda Rios-Font brings together Spiritism and cosmopolitanism in her reading of the poetic and fictional works of Manuel Corchado y Juarbe, the nineteenth-century Puerto Rican intellectual who found in Spiritism a political weapon against late imperialism.   Reinaldo Román explores how Spiritism offered a vernacular understanding of progress and futurity that competed with the urban renewal efforts spearheaded by Americans and Cuban politicians in the years after Cuba’s War of Independence.  Finally, Diana Espírito Santo demonstrates the purchase that anthropological approaches to Spiritism may yield for the historical study of the topic by exploring the complex relationship that contemporary Spiritist practitioners and their muertos in Cuba maintain to the past.  Paul Christopher Johnson, whose work at the intersections of anthropology and history has long explored spirit worlds, will comment.  And Deirdre de la Cruz, currently working on Spiritism in the early twentieth century Philippines, will chair.