Possession and Portal: Zora Neale Hurston's and Deana Lawson's Esoteric Aesthetics
Victoria Papa
Women's studies quarterly September 1, 2026 DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2026.a1005957 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Hurston and Lawson treat spirit possession as a contested field where colonial logics of capture confront ritualized plural agency, and that the "portal" functions as a method for inhabiting rupture without resolving it. Proposes "esoteric aesthetics" as a feminist mode of reading and looking, and contends the two artists refigure possession as a site of relation and Black feminist aesthetic experimentation. |
Abstract
Abstract: This essay examines how Zora Neale Hurston and Deana Lawson render ritualized spirit possession as a form of portal work within and against the institutional terrain of ethnography. Reading Hurston's Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica ([1938] 1990) alongside Lawson's staged photographic engagements with esoteric practice in Haiti, I argue that both artists treat spirit possession as a contested field in which colonial logics of capture confront ritualized forms of plural agency. Rather than opposing authenticity to performance, their work stages possession as a porous scene of address through which voice, authority, and perception circulate across human and more-than-human registers. I show how the portal operates as a method: a way of inhabiting rupture without resolving it, holding gravity and flight in tension. I name this shared perceptual practice esoteric aesthetics —a feminist mode of reading and looking attuned to subtle, occluded forces that persist within what Dionne Brand calls the "tear in the world." Together, Hurston and Lawson refigure possession as a dynamic site of relation and Black feminist aesthetic experimentation.