Prayers to Kāli: practicing radical numinosity

Abstract

Prayers to Kāli is an invocation of the radical-sacred as a way into decolonization, liberation, and healing. The radical-sacred, as I conceive of it, is broadly to do with the work of retrieving our spiritual dimensions as an inextricable part of queer, and decolonial futurities. The construction and performance of decolonial, queer-feminist theory, and knowledge discourses as fundamentally located in communities of coalition, new modes of resistance and cosmologies, form the theoretical foil of this paper. The broader aim of the paper is to highlight the significance of spiritual, corporeal, and emotional knowledges in the work of decoloniality and dismantling systems of oppression. I locate this exploration within the narrative specifics of contemporary spirit- poetry from Tamil Nadu; a radical, border site where these connections and dimensions of decoloniality, gender, desire, and resistance play out