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Nathan Snaza brings contemporary feminist and queer popular culture's resurging interest in esoteric practices like tarot and witchcraft into conversation with Black feminist and new materialist thought to highlight new ways of rejecting the colonialist and racist mission of enlightenment modernity.

In Tendings, Nathan Snaza brings contemporary feminist and queer popular culture's resurging interest in esoteric practices like tarot and witchcraft into conversation with Black feminist and new materialist thought. Analyzing writing and performances by Maryse Condé, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Starhawk, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others, Snaza introduces his theory of tending as a concept that links ontology, attunement, care, and anticipatory action to explore how worlds persist through everyday acts of participation. In contrast to the universalizing presuppositions of the enlightenment, Snaza shows how certain feminist occult and esoteric practices constitute what he calls an endarkenment that embraces decolonial spiritual knowledge. Highlighting how endarkenment practices challenge universal presumptions and reject the racializing and colonialist mission of enlightenment modernity, Snaza demonstrates the ways esoterism affirms a pluriversal worldview that reimagines what it means to live in a more-than-human world

In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends common conceptions of literacy and its relation to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, lies in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production.

This essay offers a "version" of Vinciane Despret's "ethology of ethology" through close engagement with the concepts Despret constructs in What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? Reading Despret with other thinkers associated with feminist science studies, the essay sketches Despret's critique of reductive animal science, and her corresponding work—often collaborative—to find more open, risky ways of researching animal behavior, including the behavior of the human animals we call "scientists." The distinction between control-driven work in laboratories and the more anecdotal observations she finds in some ethology and anthropology leads Despret to propose a certain ethics of asking questions and listening to answers that Snaza proposes could guide a different, more risky approach to educational research.

In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends common conceptions of literacy and its relation to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, lies in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1356/thumbnail.jpg

This paper proposes that John Dewey's thought is not entirely humanist, and that a dehumanist reconstruction of his philosophy opens curriculum studies toward a pragmatic, democratic engagement with the uncountable nonhumans that share the earth with those who think of themselves as "human." The essay outlines what is meant by both humanism and dehumanism before analyzing how a cluster of keywords in Deweyan thought—habit, experience, growth, and democracy—can be put to use in ways that are not anthropocentric or exclusively human. By arguing that Dewey's humanism (which has been taken for granted in much Deweyan scholarship) can be extracted from his potentially nonhumanist conceptualizations of democracy and pedagogy, the essay claims that Dewey's thought can prove a pragmatic point of departure for dehumanist curriculum studies, and that Deweyan pragmatics offer nonhumanist philosophy a set of concepts for better understanding what a democracy of humans, nonhuman animals, and inhuman objects could be.

This paper asks a relatively straightforward question—Is John Dewey's thought "humanist"? But neither the answer (Yes, but…) nor the importance of the question are straightforward. In asking this question, I wish to put Dewey's texts into conversation with the substantial body of research literature—mostly in the humanities and social sciences, but increasingly within educational thought as well—of nonhumanist theory, broadly understood (Murris, 2016; Siddiqui, 2016; Snaza, et al., 2014; Snaza & Weaver, 2014). Before outlining the scope of this paper, it may be useful to be direct: To the extent that the answer to my question is "Yes," Dewey's texts seem increasingly irrelevant to the problems— ecological, political, ontological—facing us in the present moment. But I will argue that Dewey's texts are not univocally or easily humanist, and that this mixed quality enables a dehumanist reconstruction of his ideas. This allows two related but distinct avenues for future engagements between Dewey and nonhumanist thought. On the one hand, it would enable those of us working in curriculum studies and educational philosophy to find a familiar point of reference for engaging the sometimes-daunting work on nonhumanism, even a way of thinking about curriculum studies as always already open to thinking beyond the merely human and in ways that are not restricted by "humanism." That is, this reading might open a way of reading Dewey differently than he has customarily been read. On the other hand, a dehumanist reconstruction of Dewey might give nonhumanist thought a set of basic concepts—experience, habit, education, democracy—that enable it to translate its considerable ontological and political insights into more "practical" avenues, making good on its implicitly pragmatic politics, and directing those politics to explicitly decolonial projects.

This article examines the conceptions of and relations between temporality and materiality as they are articulated in Gayatri Spivak's "teacherly turn," especially in Death of a Discipline (2003). It analyzes Spivak's theorization of classroom practice—in particular in comparative literature—in relation to postcolonial and new materialist politics, demonstrating that she links materiality, attention, and temporality directly to the politics of authority and domination. Beginning with an exploration of the functions of "hope" and "haunting" in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's novel Petals of Blood (1977), the article sketches Spivak's account of the pedagogical encounter as similarly both haunted and hopeful. It argues that she produces an account of classroom temporality that does not operate according to linear, humanist presuppositions, allowing her to re-configure the humanist politics of comparative literature (and aesthetic education more broadly) in ways that open toward a politics of "planetarity."