Personhood, Selfcraft and Kinaesthetic Regimes: Colonial Witchcraft and The Timeworn Death Wish

Abstract

Cosmologies form the palimpsestic bedrock of embodied Africana lifeworlds and have continued to flourish within their own modernities despite the ongoing, echoing impacts of (neo-)colonialism and global anti-blackness. As such, one might understand “being African” to necessarily consist—at least in part—of ongoing acts of resistance. Acts of continual, fluid, and intentional processes of self-restoration, re-membering, and speculative refiguration that advances black Afrikan personhood and lifeworlds, values, and aspirations. Colonialism and slavery were, at the level of implementation, kinaesthetic regimes. Sociopolitical choreographies achieved through violence, manipulation, coercion, exploitation, and destruction of bodies—an aesthetics of violence, if you will. Various ideological and physical apparatuses, aided by a cornucopia of maleficent infrastructure, and technologies ensured that an internally consistent terror formation was upheld.