South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Joseph Christian Greer
10 citations
Scholarship on the global history of psychedelics is divided into two rival approaches. This article analyzes these approaches, emphasizing the way in which ideological biases on both sides have stymied serious research on the use of psychedelic substances across space and time, before introducing the empirical approach as an alternative. The most prevalent view, “pharmacological Calvinism,”...
South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Erika Dyck
2 citations
This article offers an overview of the history of substances, plants, and fungi later classified as psychedelic. Drawing from archeological, anthropological, botanical, and clinical claims about the risks and benefits of psychedelics, this historical survey emphasizes diverse attempts to make sense of these mind-altering experiences. It tracks early efforts to harness the properties of...
South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Lana Cook
1 citation
This essay explores how psychedelic experiences are expressed in literature and how readers and viewers experience these aesthetic forms. The author connects psychedelic aesthetics and theories of affect, cognitive science, and systems thinking to argue that psychedelic aesthetics offer affective maps that lead readers through imaginal landscapes of sensation and feeling that open up moments of...
South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Patricia Dailey
What kind of experience is “literary experience,” and what might it have in common with psychedelics? This essay exposes a poetics of experience embedded within psychedelics and shows its common ground with the literary space of a poem in the Middle Ages. While writers like Aldous Huxley have often appealed to the precursor of the medieval, this essay takes a different turn. By looking at the...
South Atlantic Quarterly
April 1, 2025
Ramzi Fawaz
This piece introduces the special issue of SAQ “Psychedelic Imaginaries,” which collates fresh and theoretically sophisticated humanist perspectives on the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. Recent interdisciplinary research into psychoactive substances like LSD (or “acid”), psilocybin (or “magic mushrooms”), and MDMA (or “ecstasy”) has repeatedly shown that the therapeutically beneficial...