Interview: Richael Faithful on Black folk occultism and Black power – Epistemic Unruliness 11

Explicit content warning

04/22/16 • -1 min

Always Already Podcast, a critical theory podcast

Join James as he interviews Richael Faithful, folk healer from Washington, DC, who views their work in shamanism as a love practice and love politic. The conversation places Richael within hoodoo/rootwork/conjure traditions – Black folk occultism – that emerged during the 19th century as a psycho-spiritual and material technology that helped enslaved African Americans conjure Black power in their long history of negotiation and resistance with racial oppression. Richael and James discuss how such practices continue to offer a politics of redress to colonized bodies while working at the same time to unsettle colonial logic: the categories and causality of secular White supremacist capitalist Western modernity. For Richael and many others working within the ontologies of African Diasporic religious traditions, healing and wellness is a holistic orientation that entangles one within a web of physical, psychic, energetic, and spiritual relations. What would happen if we began to talk about White privilege and institutionalized racism as ancestral karma requiring transmutation through a radical praxis of love? Take a listen and find out!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music.

As of last week, you can now support our own neoliberal podcast subjectivization by contributing to our Patreon campaign! – more info here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/richael.mp3

Links!

Richael’s website
Freed Bodyworks, where Richael is shaman-in-residence
Video of Richael reading her short story “(Re)Embodied” published in G.R.I.T.S. Girls Raised in the South: An Anthology of Southern Queer Womyn’s Voices and Their Allies

As of last week, you can now support our own neoliberal podcast subjectivization by contributing to our Patreon campaign! – more info here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/richael.mp3

Links!

Richael’s website
Freed Bodyworks, where Richael is shaman-in-residence
Video of Richael reading her short story “(Re)Embodied” published in G.R.I.T.S. Girls Raised in the South: An Anthology of Southern Queer Womyn’s Voices and Their Allies

Previous Episode

Ep. 37 – Daniel C. Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God

In this week’s episode, James joins Rachel and John in NYC to discuss Daniel Colucciello Barber’s Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence. The discussion focuses on the introduction, and chapters 2, 4, and the conclusion. They begin by discussing Barber’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, and how this forms Barber’s framework of immanence and transcendence. They tease out the relationship of God to the limits of the imagination and of the necessity of the imagination to world making, and how Baber sees this process as thus always already political.

The conversation also focuses on Barber’s working through Deleuze’s idea of immanence as an ongoing dynamic of re-expression that demands and opens up the possibility for the political act of world making. Barber presents this view of Deleuze as useful for a theology and religious studies focus on a post-secular immanence. Questions of temporality and the difference between epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology make their appearance along with lots of crystals before the episode closes with the interpretation of a sweaty but affirming dream.

Thanks to listener Tapji for suggesting we read this text. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/barber-ep.mp3

Links:

Barber’s page at ICI Berlin and the book’s page at Edinburgh UP
Review of the book by Joshua Ramey at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
An interview with Barber on the My Name is My Name podcast
Barber’s other book, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity

Next Episode

Ep. 38 – Annemarie Mol on Ontology, Science, and Politics

Join John, Emily, and the lamp specter of B for this week’s discussion of some of the work of Dutch anthropologist and philosopher of medicine, Annemarie Mol. In this episode, we read several essays of Mol’s spanning three decades, and grappling with such questions as: who know what a woman is and how do the sciences both create and obscure her? What does Actor Network Theory (ANT) make of such terms as “coordination” and “order,” and can ANT make good on the promise of “theory” more generally? How are the “real” and “political” implicated in and through one another, and what is the ontological turn in Science and Technology Studies?

Our conversation asks about the relationship between epistemology and ontology, about the consequences of these views for democratic theory and democracy more broadly, and we even try our hand at engaging in a little Rawlsian thought experiment! We’ll leave it up to you to decide how well it plays out. The episode closes with a My Tumblr Friend from Canada question regarding some recents comments made by Bill Nye the Science Guy about the relevance of philosophy to science and in general.

We would also like to announce the launch of our new Patreon account. The first few minutes of the episode are replete with details regarding donating to the podcast, and rewards for our patrons. Please give it a listen, check out the site here, and consider sponsoring us if you are a fan! We are greatly appreciative and (we hope) appropriately humbled and reflexive by/about our neoliberal subjectivity. Thank you for your support!

Thanks to listener dmf of Synthetic Zero for suggesting we read these texts. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ep38.mp3

Links!