Africana Sacred Healing Arts (2022)
First annual conference of the Black Sacred Arts series
May 16–18, 2022
Keynote Speakers
- Yvonne Chireau, Swarthmore College
- Paul Stoller, West Chester University
- Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, Indiana University Bloomington
- Braxton Shelley, Yale University
(see full schedule and presenter information in the sidebar)
Healing in African and African Diasporic religions encompasses a wide variety of rituals and practices. Rites of healing can involve allopathic, homeopathic, and therapeutic measures that pertain to the individual as well as the collective. Healing rites linked with the arts may seek to return a person to a previous state of health, or usher them into a new state of being. In much of Africa and the African Diaspora, healers offer holistic remedies to treat people’s physical ailments, social conditions, and psychological states. Studying healing and the arts thus serves as a lens to study identities of self, community, and society more generally. A focus on the healing arts can include the study of material implements, sacred objects, the sensorial sphere of expressive culture, and embodied systems of knowledge.
Throughout the Africana world, the healing arts have not been separated into mutually exclusive categories of medical care and aesthetic experience. Modes of healing are aesthetically engaged through a multiplicity of performative actions. Often treated as epiphenomena, these expressive domains are often central to healing. In what ways do suffering and affliction activate such aesthetic responses? How do the Black healing arts inflect disease, illness, and sickness on individual, social, and political bodies?
If you would like to be on a list to receive notification of conference updates and future conference information, please email ismconferences@yale.edu.
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Image credit: Alex Batagi, “Manbo”