Theorising the materiality of witchcraft

APC Postdoctoral Fellow Alírio Karina’s article “The Politics of Witchcraft and the Politics of Blood: Reading Sovereignty and Sociality in the Livingstone Museum” was published in Postmodern Culture, as part of a special issue titled “Unsettle the Struggle, Trouble the Grounds”, that works to explore the frictions, troubles and possibilities that emerge from thinking global Blackness and Indigeneity in conversation.

Karina’s article examines witchcraft objects in the collections of the Livingstone Museum in Zambia. The article places them in conversation with anthropological and political-theoretical accounts where witchcraft never operates as more than a metaphor—for the African nation-state, capitalism, and ethnic violence, or for African ingenuity, modernity, and liberation. Instead, Karina argues that it is the materiality of witchcraft that is of theoretical concern. In taking this materiality seriously, ideas of postcolonial agency, and particularly the imagination of sovereignty as the horizon for political liberation, come into question.