Event details

With Dr. Kintra Brooks, the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University

Conjure Feminism is an epistemic framework rooted in the U.S. Black South with an intellectual history that can be traced from West Central Africa. It is a spiritual practice developed by enslaved Black women and sustained by their descendants. Yet its roots can be traced back to the Catholic Kongolese Kingdom of the 18th-Century in which there arose Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, leader of a religious and political movement, Antonianism. Dona Kimpa Vita was possessed by the spirit of St. Anthony and led tens of thousands in revising and subverting Roman Catholicism--bending it to Indigenous Kongolese religious practices. Vita was eventually burned as a heretic by the Kongolese monarchy at the behest of the Capuchin monks. This talk will connect how the spiritually grounded and politically powerful Antonine movement provided a theological example of Conjure Feminism as it eventually manifests in the contemporary Black U.S. South.