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ABSTRACT
Concepts of healing and spirituality have remained crucial to generating agency and empowerment for both black women and black men, especially in their diasporic displacement from Africa to the US. Healing has been consistently deployed to fight against the systemic racism and sexism that has pervaded and continues to persist in the lives of African diasporic subjects. Placing the discussion of healing within the current debates about interdependence and spirituality, the paper traces the notion back to its African roots and enslavement times, and attempts to delineate a genealogy of healing up to the present that grounds interdependence and interconnectedness within an ‘ethics of resistance’.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my colleague and friend Dr. Shirley A. Stave for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 ‘Black Arts International: Temporalities and Territories’ hosted by the African American department at Northwestern University. Bhabha's lecture opened the conference on 10 October 2017.
2 In the ‘Critical intersections symposium’ organized by the Women's center at Northwestern University (28 February 2018). In this deeply engaging symposium academics and social activists dialogued about these crucial topics from an intersectional standpoint.
3 Reverend Michael Nabors in the closing plenary lecture for the celebration of Black History Month, Second Baptist Church, Evanston (28 February 2018).
4 BAI conference, 10 October 2017.
5 As Paul Gilroy (Citation1993) would theorize for his influential theory of the Black Atlantic, still prevalent as an explanation for the constituency of the modern world despite the increasing criticism.
6 Many other insights can be recalled here, but especially interesting for the understanding of the deep connection between spiritual and physical dimensions is Black Magic by Yvonne Chireau (2006).
7 Zahan intimates that, in the case of matrilineal societies, female ancestors would take precedence, and the other way round for patrilineal societies. However, he insists upon the role of women: ‘without woman and the role she plays in the society of the living, the cult of ancestors would probably have no reason for existence’ (14).
8 In his fundamental book Slave Culture (1987). Olupona and Nang comment on the influence of important figures such as W. E. B. DuBois, Melville Herkovits, Zora Neale Hurston and Blyden on Stuckey's theory of the bridge between African and slave practices (Citation1993, 104).
9 For instance, Stuckey mentions the spiritual ‘Wade in the water’ as a manifestation of the African view of water as part of the regeneration natural cycle. He also affirms that the norm in slave religion was not Christ, but the ancestors and the elders, pointing out at another significant African retention (Olupona and Nang Citation1993, 105, 108).
10 Indeed, a long tradition of resistance and black protest can be traced back at least to late eighteenth century, as Bacon and McClish (Citation2006) aptly demonstrate.
11 A classic example of these beliefs can be found in Sander Gilman's ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature’ (Citation1985).
12 Even to the point of believing that there were diseases only slaves could suffer. Covey mentions the work of an 'eminent' Southern physician, Dr. Cartwright, who published articles on diseases such as ‘black vomit’, or ‘black tongue’. Other proslavery physicians followed suit, like Dr. Fenner and Dr. Nott, who expounded on the thesis that blacks were from a different species (29).
13 Covey also illustrates this point with well-known cases of physicians who shamelessly experimented with slaves, among them the case of Dr. Sims, considered ‘the father of gynecology’, who conducted painful surgical operations on enslaved women in order to treat fistulas and other female problems (30).
14 Covey also documents the way in which Native American medicines ‘were critical to the early colonists, as ships were relatively rare, especially in the Winter months. The supply of European pharmaceuticals was scarce and colonists needed to rely on indigenous treatments and materia medica’ (27).