Performances of Spiral Time

Leda Maria Martins is Professor of Literature, Arts, and Sciences at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.Bruna Barros is a multidisciplinary artist and translator.Jess Oliveira is a translator and poet.Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University.

“Ambitious and beautifully written, Performances of Spiral Time shows how to read elements of African and Indigenous American philosophy in the practices and discourses of the Americas. Leda Maria Martins shifts understandings of the temporal and the corporeal by approaching the body as or in movement. Excellently translated, this work of African Diasporic philosophy takes advantage of the poetics of the Portuguese language and, in doing so, embodies the argument in its form.”—Denise Ferreira da Silva“Performances of Spiral Time offers an introduction to Afro-Brazilian cultural poetics. Written in lyrical, evocative, yet explanatory prose, it serves as a primer on how to see and think about the world from a performative perspective. The book conveys not just an idea of orality, spiral time, and ancestrality, but also the experience of them—what it feels like to inhabit a universe defined by these elements that lie at the heart of African diasporic cultures in the Americas.”—Mary Louise Pratt

• Black Swan Song / Fred Moten xiRitornellos xiiComposition I. Theosophies, Times, and Theories 1Composition II. The Curved Time of MemoryComposition III. Poetics of OralituraComposition IV. My Destiny Is to Sing, the Mythopoetic Gesta of the ReinadosComposition V. A Canvas-Body, a Firefly PoeticsNtangu. On Spiral Time, CondensationsList of Performances and Theatrical worksNotesBibliographyIndex