Tendings

Nathan Snaza is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Richmond and author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism, also published by Duke University Press.

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.

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