Book Reviews Guyanese Komfa: The Ritual Art of Trance. Michelle Yaa Asantewa. London: Bogle L’Ouverture Publications and Way Wive Wordz Publishing, 2016. 449 pp. Jeremy Jacob Peretz University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Even a seventy-year-old’s birthday party can be eventful and wild, especially if unexpected guests arrive from another realm. Just such an arrival happened at Michelle Asantewa’s mother’s celebration in Guyana. Asantewa, who left Guyana in childhood, is an independent scholar who has taught English and Literature at the London Metropolitan University. She was a doctoral student there working on a the- sis when her family sent her a video of this birthday party-turned-ritual event. The video depicts a family gathering of singing, dancing, and drumming. Then, her cousin “ketches Komfa,” or “catches spirit,” or what Guyanese Spiritualist and Faithist practitioners otherwise call “man- ifestation.” Asantewa does not view the ex- perience as odd, but reactions from those in the video seem curious to her. Clearly, people recorded in this Komfa ceremony are aware that a young woman had under- gone possession, on the floor “flinging” herself passionately. Yet there is also con- fusion. No one seems to know how to react to their spirit visitor. Asantewa describes The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 591–598. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN 1935-4940. C  2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12405 an episode of ritual-related social drama within her own family. For Asantewa, the ambiguity and uncertainty visible in those witnessing this “trance-formance” relates to a Guyanese sense of identity. For a seg- ment of Guyanese society, this dynamic of identity building, an ever-unfolding pro- cess of revelation and self-discovery and group discovery, is often assisted through ritual trance as enacted in the birthday video. Asantewa’s book, based (directly) on her doctoral thesis (2009), explores signif- icances of Komfa within Guyanese society. The study is innovative in both its meth- ods and content. Writing from the field of English Literature, she uses an exper- imental interdisciplinary combination of sociocultural analysis, comparative liter- ature, and her own original fiction. Fo- cusing solely on Guyana is advantageous. This nation, along with its neighbors Suri- name and French Guiana, have yet to re- ceive sustained scholarly inquiry regarding their diverse religious practices. Only one book has previously been written address- ing Komfa, and Asantewa takes this work as a point of departure, incorporating her own autoethnographic and fictional expansions. Asantewa contends that for many Caribbean people, fraught colonial his- tories provide unsettled and conflictual understandings of national and cultural Book Reviews 591