Abstract This article addresses coloniality’s imposition of forgetting in the Afro-Atlantic world and attends to the gut as a “site of memory” in Afro-Diasporic religions. It opens with a consideration of what forgetting means for communities in which “counter-memories” could have mounted a challenge to dispossession and the establishment of settler-colonial political institutions. It then turns to Black Atlantic religious memory and to the colon as a metonym for gastrointestinal interiority. Building on The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), the author contends that the emphasis on the gut in initiatory Black Atlantic traditions (such as Vodou and Lucumí) reflects the gastronomic and epistemological impact of coloniality and racial capitalism. The article ends on a cautionary note, warning that while the current focus on the head in Afro-Diasporic religious discourses may contest colonized epistemologies, it threatens to reinscribe coloniality’s erasure of the gut’s role in cognition.
Elizabeth Pérez (Wed,) studied this question.