From the Publisher
Too often religious manifestations have been dismissed as irrelevant by historians of both Cuba and Puerto Rico, or they have been reduced to mere symptoms of economic or political malaise. By skillfully analyzing his sources, Roman has exposed journalists' narrative strategies, counterpoints between public and private appraisals of the phenomena, gender roles, the symbolic and emblematic elements displayed, and the typically Caribbean ploys of playful irreverence. Thus Roman's exposition is not restricted to a lineal narrative of events, but is a cumulative comparison of societies, periods, and discursive strategies.—Fernando Pico, University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras
Roman's Governing Spirits beautifully illuminates the mutual interpenetration of secular rationality and popular religiosity in the governance of postcolonial (or, perhaps more accurately, neocolonial) societies of Cuba and Puerto Rico during the first half of the twentieth century. It is at once a major contribution to our understanding of Caribbean politics and publics, a pioneering work in the historical study of Caribbean Spiritism, and a remarkably nuanced exposition of the complexity, heterogeneity, and luxurious overdetermination of motives, practices, and concerns of those for whom miracles, witchcraft, and other numinous interventions into the public life of Cuba and Puerto Rico came to represent social facts they could not help but confront—whether they believed in their reality or not.—Stephan Palmie, University of Chicago
