Tendings

Nathan Snaza's Tendings connects two currents: the renewed interest in tarot, witchcraft and other esoteric practices within contemporary feminist and queer popular culture, and the work of Black feminist and new materialist thinkers. He reads writing and performances by Maryse Condé, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Starhawk, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others.

Out of these readings Snaza develops a theory of tending, a concept that ties together ontology, attunement, care and anticipatory action. Through it he examines how worlds continue to exist because of ordinary, everyday acts of participation.

Snaza sets this against the universalizing assumptions of the Enlightenment. He argues that certain feminist occult and esoteric practices amount to what he calls an endarkenment, a way of embracing decolonial spiritual knowledge. These practices challenge universal presumptions and reject the racializing, colonialist mission of enlightenment modernity. In his account, esotericism supports a pluriversal worldview and offers a different way to imagine life in a more-than-human world.