Dr. Yanique Hume, University of the West Indies, “Marking Sacred Space in the Jamaican Dead Yard: Dance and the Invocation of Ancestral Presence”

Dancing for the dead takes on aesthetic and embodied dimensions that at once serves to placate the departed while consoling and entertaining those who remain.  In my exploration of the intersections of embodiment and the sacred I explore the expansive terrain and emotive registers of which funerary dancers travel during the traditional nine night or commemorative rites associated with the Jamaican Dead Yard.   I examine the body in motion during these heightened ritualized moments to discern how sacred space is marked and likewise how rituals of remembrance reconstitute kinship bonds across time and memory.  I focus on first examining the Dead Yard as a transformative and transcendental space and ceremonial event and then move to the wake complex dances that are part of collective ritualizing before moving to analysis of notions of “sensing presence” in Kumina embodied praxis.

Dr. Todne Thomas, Harvard University, “Between Black Sacred Matter(s) and Smattered Sacred(s): Encountering Black Church Arson in the Museum”

Like symbols and sacred spaces, the archiving of black sacred matter vis-à-vis artwork opens up a number of artistic, religious, and cultural interpretations that may overlap or be irreconcilable.  I apply this insight in my experimental reading of Anti-Mass—an art installation by the British artist Cornelia Parker.  Acquired by the DeYoung Museum in 2006, Anti-Mass is a three-dimensional sculpture composed of burned timbers that Parker collected from the remains of a church arson that ravaged a Southern Black Church community in Alabama.  Informed by conversation with museum staff, my reading of visitor’s comments and observation of museum patrons’ interactions with the piece, and my own interactions with the art piece and broader ethnographic work on contemporary black church arson in the U.S., I argue that Anti-Mass inhabits an amorphous space between the material and the spiritual.  I also argue that Anti-Mass, through its representational indexing of the burned black church as an icon of U.S. racio-religious experience, catalyzes existential, dissident, and social valences of blackness.

Dr. J. Lorand Matory, Duke University, “White Slaves and Other Empowered Black Atlantic Things”

The Enlightenment left the West with a conscious and public rhetoric of white male equality and has pursued, by fits and starts, an ideal of progressively conferring individualist and egalitarian citizenship rights on a broader range of races, genders, and classes.  However, the real-world dominance of white men has left many of them feeling like frauds, and the pursuit of individualism has left US Americans of every kind feeling deeply lonely.  For some white Americans, steeply hierarchical spiritual and sexual relationships have provided a solution to what is dissatisfying about both the ideals and the realities of post-Enlightenment social relations.  Afro-Atlantic slavery and the religions of the black Atlantic are often influential–albeit repressed–models of these relationships.

This talk places Euro-American erotic and spiritual master-slave relationships in their broader Afro-Atlantic context and, through comparison with the fruitful controversies surrounding our exhibition of black religiosity in the Western museum, reflects on the potential delights and difficulties of my emerging project–researching, teaching about, and exhibiting kinky white spirituality on the university campus.