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In Tendings, Nathan Snaza brings contemporary feminist and queer popular culture's resurging interest in esoteric practices like tarot and witchcraft into conversation with Black feminist and new materialist thought. Analyzing writing and performances by Maryse Condé, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Starhawk, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others, Snaza introduces his theory of tending as a concept that links ontology, attunement, care, and anticipatory action to explore how worlds persist through everyday acts of participation. In contrast to the universalizing presuppositions of the enlightenment, Snaza shows how certain feminist occult and esoteric practices constitute what he calls an endarkenment that embraces decolonial spiritual knowledge. Highlighting how endarkenment practices challenge universal presumptions and reject the racializing and colonialist mission of enlightenment modernity, Snaza demonstrates the ways esoterism affirms a pluriversal worldview that reimagines what it means to live in a more-than-human world.
List of contents
Preface. In the Cards vii
Introduction. Tending Endarkenment Esoterisms 1
1. “What Is a Witch?”
Tituba’s Subjunctive Challenge 25
2. Feeling Subjunctive Worlds: Reading Second-Wave Feminist and Gay Liberationist Histories of Witchcraft 51
3. Man’s Ruin: Hearing Divide and Dissolve 81
4. Ceremony: Participation and Endarkenment Study 100
Conclusion. On Deictic Participation in/as Tending 133
Acknowledgments 143
Notes 147
References 177
Index 193
About the author
Nathan Snaza
Summary
Nathan Snaza brings contemporary feminist and queer popular culture’s resurging interest in esoteric practices like tarot and witchcraft into conversation with Black feminist and new materialist thought to highlight new ways of rejecting the colonialist and racist mission of enlightenment modernity.
