holy exorcisms
a bell hooks symposium recap + community offering
I’m hosting a teach-in on “Holy Exorcisms” on Wednesday, July 5th at 6-7:30pm CT! I would love for you to attend. Register here using this link and receive all details. Stay connected here, and through TCW’s instagram in the meantime.
holy exorcisms + bell hooks
December of 2021 was a really pivotal year in taking my political engagement and being a student of radical Black feminisms and womanism to a deeper level. To which, bell hooks, Joy James, Audre Lorde, Ella Baker, Ijeoma Umebinyuo, alongside many many others, really clarified and sharpened the way I conceptualize, move, and engage both in my world and the world.
At this point, I had been one year out from my transition away from my church, and had a surge of questions about Church at-large, Black women, our labor and participation in those spaces, and if redemption or reformation from what was not well was possible.
So, in going through the works of bell hooks and finishing one of my papers based on her works on Dec. 14th, I then heard of her passing on the 15th and was gutted. That moment for me really shifted gears when it came to sitting with and remembering the lives of Black women that’ve been cut short, and marked by all systems of domination. I had to come back to my Mother and her story, revisited once more to story of Tabitha (Acts 9:36-42), and I remain thankful to bell hooks, and the Black feminist and womanist thinkers and people for bringing me back, “home.”
Last weekend, I was grateful and excited (and nervous!) to present at the 2023 Inaugural bell hooks Symposium in Berea College, KY! Within the Black Feminist Theory section, I taught “Holy Exorcisms” which is a combination of my thesis work - “Standing on Demonic Grounds: A Diasporic Womanist Hermeneutical Biomythography of Blackwomen within Seventh-day Adventist Church Spaces.”
In thinking about holy exorcisms, and how/if/what does holy exorcisms have to do with bell hooks, I’m exploring the possibilities of this ethic as it relates to the systems of domination that hooks identifies - imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy.
For this space, I define Holy Exorcisms as…
A spiritual Black radical feminist ethic that rejects what the powers of domination coins as “good,” “holy,” “acceptable,” and “righteous” by giving virtue to revolutionary love & struggle, unrest, anger, autonomy, the “demonic” and the unholy to cause destructions and the end to what is evil and awaken us to critical action that brings about just living.
Using biomythography and hauntology, Holy Exorcisms goes further to address how the Christian Church (space, place, people) is another segment of the imperialist white supremacist cisheteropatriachial Empire, that partners with these systems, to solidify an environment where the Church needs Blackness to remain the nonhuman other so that any violence done, particularly to Black women, aren’t seen as violence (because Black people/women are viewed as things and not humans in this antiBlack world.)
I’m concerned about the lingering presences of the deaths and terrorizing of Black women, their bodies, and their flesh as the currency that builds this Church. My questions include - what is an exorcism? How is it used here? What is “demonic?” How is it used here? What is death? How is it used here? And, what do I mean that the Christian Church is an unrelenting death site that requires Black death(s) including and beyond the physical to function?
If whoever has the power to kill (or keep alive) can also determine what evidences remain or are thrown out, then a reclamation of the dead, is a necessary, critical, and loving work.
As exorcisms are the “expulsion or attempted expulsion of a supposed evil spirit from a person or place,” here, engaging in holy exorcisms aims to rebuild the gaps between those in the physical and transcended realms.
Registration Link
I’m hosting a teach-in on “Holy Exorcisms” on Wednesday, July 5th at 6-7:30pm CT! I would love for you to attend. Register here using this link and receive all details. Stay connected here, and through TCW’s instagram in the meantime.
Holy Exorcisms - A (partial) Reading List
bell hooks
All about love - chapter 11
Belonging: A Culture of Place - chapters 1-3
Christina Sharpe - In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Joy James - In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
Katherine McKittrick - Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle
Jennifer C. Nash - Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality
