In Tendings, Nathan Snaza brings contemporary feminist and queer popular culture’s resurging interest in esoteric practices like tarot and witchcraft into conversation with Black feminist and new materialist thought. Analyzing writing and performances by Maryse Condé, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Starhawk, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others, Snaza introduces his theory of tending as a concept that links ontology, attunement, care, and anticipatory action to explore how worlds persist through everyday acts of participation. In contrast to the universalizing presuppositions of the enlightenment, Snaza shows how certain feminist occult and esoteric practices constitute what he calls an endarkenment that embraces decolonial spiritual knowledge. Highlighting how endarkenment practices challenge universal presumptions and reject the racializing and colonialist mission of enlightenment modernity, Snaza demonstrates the ways esoterism affirms a pluriversal worldview that reimagines what it means to live in a more-than-human world.

Nathan Snaza is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Richmond and author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism, also published by Duke University Press.

Preface. In the Cards  vii
Introduction. Tending Endarkenment Esoterisms  1
1. “What Is a Witch?” Tituba’s Subjunctive Challenge  25
2. Feeling Subjunctive Worlds: Reading Second-Wave Feminist and Gay Liberationist Histories of Witchcraft  51
3. Man’s Ruin: Hearing Divide and Dissolve  81
4. Ceremony: Participation and Endarkenment Study  100
Conclusion. On Deictic Participation in/as Tending  133
Acknowledgments  143
Notes  147
References  177
Index  193