Assurance of Infinity: In the Caribbean

This seminar examines Afro-Atlantic and indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, histories: conceptions of magic, space, time, and memory. These texts (visual, oral, written) present anti-colonial methodologies that challenge Western linear time and Cartesian space. They are a lens through which we can re-examine art history, history, academia, museums, and the archive. Beginning with Taíno sacred landscapes and BaKongo cosmograms and power entities, the course moves through early colonial Caribbean healing worlds, Kumina ritual practice, Palo Monte spirit technologies, and Vodou metaphysics in Kiskeya (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), through anthropological, theoretical, and artistic texts by Kimbwandende Fu-Kiau, Dianne Stewart, José Oliver, Pablo Gómez, Todd Ramón Ochoa, M. Jacqui Alexander, and others. In concert with readings, we will examine the visual culture of Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous spiritual systems and the art they have inspired, including work by artists José Bedia Valdés (Cuba), Firelei Báez (Dominican Republic), Maria Magdalena Campos Pons (Cuba), and Edouard Duval Carrié (Haiti). Through sustained attention to the visual cultures of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous spiritual practice, death worlds, possession, spirit matter, sacred pedagogy, and film, students will learn to think through indigenous Caribbean, West African, and Afro-Atlantic cosmologies, to interpret ritual and material culture as archives of knowledge, and to situate art, history, and anthropology within broader ontological frameworks. By the end of the semester, students will understand how Black and Indigenous conceptions of magic, space, time, and memory reconfigure how we come to understand the world around us and will produce an original research paper that examines these traditions.