This article examines the impact of Neo-Vedanta philosophy on Black jazz musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, with a special focus on Alice Coltrane. By using what I have come to understand as a decolonial analysis, I situate the artists whose works I discuss in the context of a wider decolonial turn in the late twentieth century. In addition to tracing the transmission of Neo-Vedanta philosophy,...
Recent debates about the ethics of identity in a global age have dealt with how to prioritize conflicting local and global allegiances. Guided by these concerns, the fiction of Alice Walker develops a distinctive view of how local cultures and global movements can fruitfully interact. This vision depends on concepts from Asian religions, a major influence that critics of Walker have largely...
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this article examines the importance of place and gender within constructions of race politics in Carlos Castaneda’s series on shamanism. Championing a “separate reality” predicated on an indigenous worldview, Castaneda’s lessons invited transnational middle-class youth to "journey" alongside him to camposcape—an anachronistic and idealized...