The Economics of the Unseen+Dark Policy for an Uncertain Future

​The liner notes to D’Angelo’s Voodoo offer “The Aquarian Age is a matriarchal age, and if we are to exist as men in this new world many of us must learn to embrace and nurture that which is feminine with all our he-arts.” And within traditional Ifa cosmology, femininity is understood as darkness, or a contracting force necessary to maintain the divine balance of social order. This workshop builds off the insights of Voodoo and Ifa cosmology, and proposes that in the face of our cisheteropatriarchal society, we need a new approach to political, economic, social, and ecological policy that nurtures the feminine, or darkness, within each of us. During this workshop, Dr. zuri arman and Oluwakemi Oritsejafor will provide theoretical frameworks and practical models of sustainable and anti-patriarchal solidarity economies that are constructed with these decolonial values in mind, such as donut economics and the movement for regrowth. In addition to learning about these alternatives, participants will also engage in individual and group exercises that prepare their mind and body for confronting how the unseen labor of femmes, queer and trans folks, black people, and nature as a whole is extracted by a capitalist anti-black economic system determined to keep us off-balance and out of alignment with our inner selves. In the end, participants will leave with strategies for what Jamaican anti-colonial writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls an “autonomous feminism” for navigating the uncertainty ahead without simply projecting their own darkness onto other marginalized people and communities.

​Readings will be sent out two weeks prior to workshop.