Realms unseen

Abstract

AbstractSince 2006, albinism has emerged as both a subject and an object of contestation in Tanzania and beyond. An abiding global narrative purports that, as a recessively inherited condition, albinism is fetishized by Africans who falsely attribute otherworldly potentials to albino body parts and commodify them in a grisly market run by “traditional” healers and their patrons. In response, translocal albinism rights stakeholders have formed to cement a singular notion of albinism and, with “it,” a notion of unseen power that cancels the agency of particular nonhumans. Their work diverges from those who insist on multiple other instantiations of albinism and worlds unseen, some of which offer compelling explanations of recent violence rooted in entanglement and complicity, rather than an Indigenous cosmology. In this context, I argue for a conceptual and methodological approach to social movements and minority groups rooted in decolonizing unseen realms and embracing epistemic and ontological openness.