The term “embodied knowledge” is often used as if its meaning is evident, and as if there is clarity about the relations it brings into view. The bodies in motion of the kumina festival Tambufest tell us about the forms of collective world-building that exist outside of but in relation to the juridical structures of sovereignty that govern modern Western political and social life.

Joe Arroyo’s music, specifi cally his carnival compositions, generates modes of solidarity that transcend national and temporal boundaries. His “musical mechanism,” employing the clave rhythm and improvisational structures, facilitates a collective reinhabitation of the past, a redemptive challenging of colonial divisions between the living and the dead. Arroyo’s work, therefore, demonstrates the transformative power of music to forge solidarity across carnival participants.

The anarchic embrace of difference in the encounters of and variations on Western and non-Western spiritual practices in Martinique reveals ways of disrupting the univocal, linear, and centralizing violence of plantation society. Examining the various techniques of collective ecstasy through song, dance, and other sacramental signs of spirit possession calls attention to anticolonial models of social organization, and presencing.

In 2019 British choreographer Seke Chimutengwende began research on a new project exploring horror, haunted houses, and the hauntings of colonial history. It begins in darkness (2022) emerged in collaboration with the dancers who perform each iteration. Working through the figure of the haunted stately home, It begins in darkness excavates—and exorcises—the horror of slavery’s histories through dance.

Putting the work of the poet Nathaniel Mackey into correspondence with that of the singer, composer, performance and video artist M. Lamar offers a unique perspective on the complex relationship between automation and possession. Mackey’s Andoumboulou and Mu move in and through M. Lamar so that possession and automation are destabilized and replaced by molecular distintegrations of plantation worlds and the sonic apertures of a Black Afrofuturist Android.

Despite myths of its dematerialization, capitalism continues to deepen its reliance on resource extraction. Performances by Otobong Nkanga and Seba Calfuqueo confront this trend, mapping it onto longer histories of expropriation in Namibia and Chile, respectively. By activating sculptural objects composed of mined raw materials, both artists make visible the colonial and ongoing forms of extractive violence that underpin automation and the socalled green energy transition.

Anarchist, Black Liberation Army member, and “Gender Rebel” Kuwasi Balagoon spent a lifetime performing a practice of resistance and autonomy—“freedom as a habit”—given kinetic, embodied form in his Exercise Book. Kuwasi Balagoon’s writings, as well as recollections from friends and comrades, are placed in dialog with James Boggs’s writings on automation to explore the tensions and frictions in the encounter between automation as a social formation and the insistent enactment of freedom as habit.

ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) names a mysteriously relaxing tingling sensation certain people experience in response to a range of stimuli, including the close, careful attention of others. Since 2010, a form of roleplay video has developed in which the performer addresses the camera/viewer in the guise of a medical or service professional. These relaxing enactments evoke fictional workplaces, raising questions about precarious and exploited labor in a globalized digital economy.

Bodies in possession and in revolt are often framed as being “caught” by some other entity—a spirit, a force, or a memory. Cases of rebellion involve a loss of intentionality of movement, unlike a subject who wills and decides. What is the political significance of the illegibility of such movements, before they are consigned to taxonomies and diagnoses that render them pathological, criminal, or demonic? What thinking about dance might this permit?