Conjure Feminism: The Root(work) of Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions

Abstract:

Conjure Feminism is an evolving theory of Black women’s intellectual legacies of spirit work (divination, healing, dream interpretation, herbology) that informs their everyday existence—from childrearing, food ways, and material culture to folklore, gardening and death practices formulated by Brooks, Martin, & Simmons.  Conjure feminism is a fluid concept, but at its source builds from specific African-derived tenets. Conjure feminism is an epistemological framework that privileges Black women’s sacred knowledge and folkloric practices of spirit work. It provides Black folk the cultural fluidity necessary for survival in a world where race is a socially constructed fiction with real world consequences. The Divine Feminine is its source of knowledge and conjure feminism, arguably, is a type of activism. Spiritual systems such as rootwork, obeah, conjure, Vodou, Candomblé, Palo Mayombe and others are understood as freedom practices. Conjure feminism, above all else, ensures the survival of Black lives—gender notwithstanding. It is deeply womanist in this regard.  Most importantly, it is ancestral work that creates genealogies of knowledge and other ways of knowing that are inherited, transmitted, and bequeathed among women of African descent. Conjure Feminism names a specific lineage of Black women’s spiritual interventions and knowledge that has evolved and continues to embed itself in their creative practices. Whether imbedded in the oral tradition of ‘telling lies’ or in the cinematography of the series like Queen Sugar, Hortense Spillers and Marjorie Pryse argue “that however fleetingly history recorded their lives, there [exists] a women’s tradition, handed down along female lines.”  I dare to offer a name for it and advance the intellectual and intertextual discourse around conjure feminism. As curators of the path, it only makes sense that it appears in Black women’s creative output. I explicate exactly how and where it is manifesting in contemporary creative works and how its application deepens and expands Black Feminist theoretical groundings.

Bio:

Dr. Kameelah L. Martin is a Professor of African American Studies and Dean of Graduate Studies at the College of Charleston. Her scholarly expertise sits at the crossroads of African Diaspora literature(s) of the U.S. and Caribbean and folklore studies. As a cultural studies scholar, she is trained in the African American literary and vernacular traditions with emphasis on twenty and twenty-first century prose.  In 2013, Palgrave McMillan published her first monograph Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, & Other Such Hoodoo which engages how African American authors have shifted, recycled, and reinvented the conjure woman figure primarily in twentieth century fiction. Dr. Martin is also the author of Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in American Cinema (Lexington 2016) which explores the treatment of the priestess figure in American cinema.