Abstract
Responding to contemporary calls for understanding indigenous spiritualities as intrinsic rather than “primitive” ways of knowing, this paper examines how Afro-Caribbean communities sustain relationships to the sacred, ancestral, and more-than-human through embodied traditions—song, movement, invocation, and silence (Glissant, 1997; Alexander, 2005). These practices operate outside epistemic boundaries of Hegemonic Christianities and colonial secularism(s), resisting conventional religious typologies. I theorize these traditions as corporeal archives—sensory modes of knowing, remembering, and resisting that echo Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics,” a poetics of historical and spiritual rhythm challenging linear colonial temporality (Brathwaite, 1984). These embodied traditions enact return not to static origins, but to dynamic relationality—refusing colonial severance of body from spirit, land from meaning, ritual from critique. Drawing on Marisol de la Cadena’s earth-beings (2015) and Arturo Escobar’s pluriverse (2018), I position Afro-Caribbean ritual as lived ontological plurality, where human and more-than-human beings co-create meaning beyond colonial world-making logics. Through diffractive methodologies that attend to emergent encounters, this research follows rhizomatic pathways moving with—rather than studying—these embodied practices (Manning, 2016; Barad, 2007). Employing “research-creation,” I allow Afro-Caribbean rhythms and relations to generate new modes of scholarly attention (Manning & Massumi, 2014). This approach demonstrates how these traditions constitute counter-logic rooted in rhythmic survival, ethical intimacy, and refusal to forget—disrupting accumulative dispossession central to colonial modernity (McKittrick, 2006; Hartman, 2019). Ultimately, this work demonstrates how Afro-Caribbean traditions offer prescient wisdom for contemporary ecological and spiritual crises.
Presenters
Anthony Manuel Cruz PantojasStudent, PhD Estudios Culturales, Universidad Ana G. Méndez, Gurabo, Puerto Rico, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Indigenous Spiritualities in Global Perspective
KEYWORDS
Afro-Caribbean traditions, Indigenous Spiritualities, Embodied practices, Decolonial spirituality
