Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Anthropology; Human Rights

Project Advisor 1

Kwame Holmes

Project Advisor 2

Robert Hardwick Weston

Abstract/Artist's Statement

There is a belief in contemporary left politics that we must re-enchant the world because it has been disenchanted by coloniality: the meanings and sacredness which uphold community and sustain harmony with the earth have been drained through the ‘Western’ project of colonization, modernization, and capitalism. The problem with this belief is that we cannot re-enchant what we understand to be inherently disenchanted.

Via the ontological turn in anthropology, an understanding of the world emerges that is not disenchanted, but inherently imbued with meanings. Enchantment is not applied upon or removed from nonhuman bodies by human minds but is woven into the very polymorphous matter of the multiplicity of bodies. All things are animated.

From this perspective, coloniality is not a disenchanting force but the opposite – a hegemonic enchantment defined by capitalist animism and the modern myth. In response, its ontological/epistemological force must be subverted not through the constituent creation of a new form of life, but the rendering-inoperative of the colonial form’s perpetuity. This destitution, which I focus on in the form of profanation, would not leave a world desolate and disenchanted in its wake, but instead allow life to take forms of growth and death which perpetuate in total responsivity. I argue that the specter of such a decolonized world can be glanced in our own, through the metaphysics of multinaturalism.

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