On the Potentials of Black Feminist Spirituality

In We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism, Marina Magloire prompts the reader to ask: When exploring the pursuit of “freedom,” what concrete practices are available and emerging for Black American women in the early twenty-first century? One obvious response that Magloire's text offers to its readers is a collective belief in Black women's spiritual practices as a fluid pursuit for self-expression. More specifically, Magloire centers the text on an in-depth exploration of Haitian Vodou as a form of political resistance. Magloire argues that Black feminism models a collective practice that counters global conflicts of racial capitalism. The structure of Magloire's argument captures the experiences of Black women across the diaspora, emphasizing how they publicly document and navigate their unique relationships with Blackness “as a strength rather than inauthenticity” (5). She cites Angela Davis and notes how “sexuality” and “travel” provided the most evidence of freedom for people of African descent emerging from an enduring history of enslavement and oppression during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. This sentence's direct reference to “sexuality” shows Magloire exploring the significance of collectivism and spatial awareness in relation to feminism and queerness. As a result, Magloire's text models a nuanced Black feminist praxis that notes the transformative power of “multiplicity” across sexuality, race, and time.Throughout the introduction and chapter 1, it is exciting to consider the intricate ways in which Magloire describes the process of Afro-diasporic spirituality becoming an antidote for connection across time and geography. Magloire indexes queer Black feminist scholars’ works as a method to disrupt the cyclical nature of racist patriarchal thought. Methodologically speaking, she uses extensive forms of evidence that span across performance studies and ethnography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utilizing interdisciplinary research to study race, gender and sexuality across and within national affiliations shows the liberatory possibilities that a spiritual history of Black feminism can offer its readers. In the following chapters, Magloire takes a transformative approach to the archive by documenting artists and women (like Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, and Lucille Clifton) who share a radical interest in the historiography of the intellectual and creative Black experience.Since the emergence of Black feminist theory as a discourse in the twentieth century, African American female thinkers have discussed the intricacies and multitudes of their varying experiences and the ways in which Black feminist theory is entangled with queer theory. By highlighting the significance of Black feminist theory across the diaspora through the lens of spirituality, Magloire's research skillfully challenges the Western academic arc of Black feminism. Magloire achieves this literary objective by using performance studies to bridge the gap between physical gestures and postcolonial theory. Like the work of Diana Taylor, Magloire's urges her readers to reorient the ways social memory and cultural identity in the African diaspora have traditionally been studied through a disciplinary framework. Her text looks through the lens of embodied behaviors (specifically, ancestral spiritual practices like Vodou) that make Black feminist stories, memories, and struggles visible. Magloire invites her readers to complicate texts in Black feminist theory by providing an alternative genealogy of Black feminist thought.Primarily in chapter 2 and chapter 4 of the text, Magloire explores how Vodou adds nuance to contemporary understandings of “collectivity.” She notes how Vodou epistemology can be used as a framework to simultaneously challenge racial capitalism and study fluid forms of community building across barriers of culture, class, and time. More specifically, Magloire cites the playwright Lorraine Hansberry and the performer Nina Simone as two Black and privately queer women. Magloire argues that Hansberry's text “Toussaint” (1961) and Simone's work “It is Finished” (1974) “break down the limitations of prescriptive gender roles and compulsory heterosexuality” (11). Strategically, Magloire cites these artists’ choices to counter a limiting and prescriptive narrative supported by her exploration of African diasporic spiritual practices.Chapter 2 provides space for Magloire to extensively discuss the seemingly queered ways in which Hansberry and Simone radicalize each other's creative works and political ideologies. She notes that “the two women never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when [they] got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk” (43). Moreover, Magloire highlights the exact importance of Hansberry and Simone's intellectual and interpersonal exchange by stating that “revolution was necessitated not just by their Blackness riding the tide of 1950s and 1960s Black Liberation, but by their covert queerness. As queer Black women, they shared a revolutionary sensibility that demanded change beyond integration and assimilation” (43). Magloire articulates the complex ways in which Black queer and female creatives craved and cultivated a form of liberation that exists “beyond” a heteronormative understanding of acculturation. She cites the scholarly work of Kevin Mumford and, of course, Imani Perry as well as Soyica Diggs Colbert (who each authored biographies about Lorraine Hansberry) as important entries into the artists’ written traces of queerness. Magloire argues that Hansberry and Simone shared a sense of “non-normativity [that] drew their revolutionary visions away from America and gradualism and toward anti-colonial revolution in Africa and the Caribbean” (43). In other words, as queer Black women, Hansberry and Simone shared a seemingly more revolutionary approach to Black liberation in comparison to their contemporaries. Magloire astutely notes that Hansberry and Simone's covert queerness demanded a “change beyond integration and assimilation” (43).Chapter 3 carefully outlines the limitations of women activists within Black nationalist organizations. Magloire highlights how their political organizing mirrored an implicitly heteronormative framework that “denied the possibility of other sexual and gender identifications” (69). Here, she positions the poetic visions of Audre Lorde and Lucille Clifton as significant and often overlooked reflections of the Black power ideologies of the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 4 demonstrates Magloire's effective and necessary choice to bridge “third world feminisms” to the United States through an exploration of ancestrally centered religions like Vodou. Highlighting social liberation struggles in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and “the ghetto Arab world” through the lens of feminist spiritual organizations of the 1970s and 1980s provides Magloire with necessary interlocutors needed to explore “antidotes to cultural alienation” (101).Chapter 5 emphasizes the community building practices rooted in the desire to connect with ancestral centered religions like Vodou. With a decolonial lens, Magloire explores practices of Vodou while investigating and refining a multidimensional collection of research that uncovers the significance of queer, Black, and female writers. How can Afro-diasporic spirituality provide both a tangible and imaginary space for Black feminist scholars to find a home that is both stable and rooted in elasticity? This question seems to be the beginning of many explorations on the intersectionality of race, sexuality, and gender that Magloire encourages her readers to consider through a spiritual history of Black feminism.