‘Something like praying’: Syncretic Spirituality and Racial Justice in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

This chapter reads Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing in relation to African-American spiritual traditions including Hoodoo, and Haitian and Louisiana Vodou. It argues that it is these systems of belief and the practices associated with them, including root work and medicine, conjuration, and the invocation of loas and other deities, which structure the metaphysical landscape of the novel. It maps Ward’s depiction of the practices, language and iconography of Hoodoo, and Haitian and Louisiana Vodou, a deployment that is neither a straightforward documentation, nor uninterested in historico-social specificity. This strategy constitutes an effort to produce a new ontology specifically capable both of identifying the ways violently oppressive racial ideologies impose ‘creaturely’ existences on marginalised subjects and of accommodating modes of knowing and being in the world (child-like modes, animal modes) potentially capable of dismantling such ideologies. In so doing, it places Ward’s literary strategy in conversation with wider contemporary trends in the intersections between political activism and African-American spirituality.