Undisciplined! A womanist ethnography for an Africana practical theology

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay addresses the question of epistemology within Africana religious traditions, most particularly Haitian Vodou. It ponders, what lies within as well as beyond the human that gives us a glimpse of the Unseen? Stressing the need for a new methodology, I enter into conversation with Dianne Stewart and Tracey Hucks’ transdisciplinary method and join Christina Sharpe to argue for the undisciplinary. Going beyond material culture and rituals, the undisciplinary emphasises knowledge that is embodied and situated. It privileges the body-in-relation. In addition to ethnography and archival research, the undisciplinary makes room for the poetic: the whispers of the sea, the secrets of the tree, the messages that birds bring. Anchored in the Crossing, the undisciplinary does not write about Spirit; it writes with Spirit. Deeply concerned with the point of conjunction between the space of excess and the space of nothingness, the undisciplinary highlights the need for the ‘I’ within scholarship: a historical, political, and spiritual self. This methodology guides the ethics of an Africana practical theology that centers practices as a form of reparation and regards scholarship itself as an act of spiritual care.