Embodiment and Enspiritment: Exploring Spirit-Body Relations in Contemporary Francophone West African Literature and Film

The persistent presence of spirits in African literature and film reflects the belief held by nearly 3,000 African nations that the human principle comprises both material and immaterial selves. This philosophical and religious conviction inspires creatives from sub-Saharan Africa, leading to (performance) art, film, and literary narratives that depict various interpretations of the spiritual principle. Despite the ubiquitous presence of the immaterial self in African narratives, literary scholars largely undertheorise the invisible, immaterial component of the human principle (spirits). Historians, anthropologists, and religious scholars have made critical interventions that place spirits in various forms, according to diverse African cosmologies, at the centre of discourse on cultural and political identity and power. "Embodiment and Enspiritment: Exploring Spirit-Body Relations in Contemporary Francophone West African Literature and Film" builds from these disciplines by staging an interdisciplinary conversation between these African fields and contemporary African literature and film to theorise a range of possible relationships between spirits and bodies. It engages francophone literature and film written and produced in the twenty-first century, such as Mati Diop’s film Atlantique (2019), Léonora Miano’s La saison de l'ombre (2013), Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021), Calixthe Beyala’s Les arbres en parlent encore (2002), and Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï (2001), to argue that understanding Africa’s spiritual world is essential for unpacking the sexuality, identity, power dynamics, and gender of characters in African narratives.
Drawing on historical and anthropological evidence as well as religious and philosophical beliefs, "Embodiment and Enspiritment" theorises two predominant spirit-body dynamics within the narratives under discussion—enspiritment and embodiment. Through these two distinct ontologies, this project posits that access to the spiritual world via mysticism allows subaltern characters to subvert power dynamics within the postcolonial. Spirits within the dynamic of enspiritment and embodiment function as empowering beings whose presence within hosting bodies poses an interventionist agenda that troubles the oppressive postcolony. "Embodiment and Enspiritment" cautions against positing bodies via-à-vis spirits as victims because this positioning flattens the ontological possibilities that the spiritual world offers. Rather, it argues that oppressive, subaltern conditions in the physical world catalyse spiritual intervention in private and public spheres.
By highlighting precolonial spiritual epistemologies within postcolonial oppressive strictures, this project interrogates how the persistent presence of the workings of the spiritual world disrupts the constructed societal order of the postcolony. Additionally, it questions how Africa’s spiritual realities complicate dominant discourses on identity, sexuality and gender. Emphasising world-sense paradigms that shift attention away from the material, this project proposes that the return of colonial-era banished spiritual epistemes forges a resistance campaign that reintroduces the precolony into the postcolony. "Embodiment and Enspiritment" makes visible the invisible, dismissed epistemologies of precolonial Africa and argues that these contemporary depictions bespeak the literary and filmic spaces as sites of political, class and economic resistance.