Introduction: Archival Weight, Queer Temporalities, and Ritual Formations in Jamaica

Figure 1: A Jamaican Revival Moment in an Encounter with Blackness (University of Kansas, 2023).¹

In An Encounter with Blackness, choreographed by the researcher, thirteen dancers carried the archival weight of a Black experience—which is, as the photo details, a labor in a movement vocabulary perhaps foreign to them, yet one that initiates bodily possibilities of spiritual implication and embodied transfer. At exactly 9 minutes and 38 seconds, the dancers’ torsos thrust forward, making them look to the earth and compelling the arrival of something “spiritual.” The bodies’ closeness to the earth creates the conditions for the dancers to push the ribcage out while calling attention to their bottoms, causing them to be in full view. The photo then moves in a kind of Black tempo (for those familiar with this Revival step), one requiring a mode of reading that resists the colonial terms of intelligibility. The choreography restages a Black Jamaican experience—intending to formulate a theoretical and practical analytic to interpret how Jamaicanness arrives in Revival in the state of surrogation and mnemonic traces. Restaging then places the particularities of this Black Jamaican experience under the conditions of performance mediation to do something else with it, queer it perhaps, not necessarily to place the dancing under the terms of the presence/absence continuum, but rather something around the absencing of violence ascribed to the bottom as a general aesthetic of moral disruption, refiguring it as a site of erotic excess and a queer spiritual praxis.

The bottom, the ribcage, and the pelvis as queer hermeneutics allow me to move Black Queer thought—not as an expert on these topics, but as someone implicated in the ideas explored. Here, my implicated body correlates with theory and practice, indicating the epistemic-experientiality of embodied discourse, its queer heterodoxical promise, and subsequently the performative betrayal of the putative nationalism that regulates the modern Jamaican state. Throughout this piece, I use “queerness” to refer to relationships that are strange, for example the marriage between European cultural systems and African ways of being that birthed new formations. Queerness also operates at the level of gender performances allowing the embodiment of feminized movement vocabularies to arrive without the imposition of the heteronormative power matrix.

Revivalism and Kumina in Jamaica offer a lens for understanding how the intersection of movement, spirituality, and queerness can disrupt colonial epistemologies and provide alternative frameworks for identity and resistance. As a continuation of Black Studies’ radical call for new genres of black life, and the ongoing anticolonial critique as it relates to language, this essay argues that Revivalism and Kumina in Jamaica are sites that produce cultural breaks which briefly “queerify” religiosity to agitate the neo-liberal post-colonial moment. A break from religious formations is evident in and through the strategic confluence of the political, spiritual and same-sex auto-eroticism initiated in Afro-Jamaican religious schedules. I contend that these practices engage with Afro-diasporic ideologies by resisting colonial binaries that create a violent separation between body and spirit, secular and sacred, and heterosexuality and homosexuality. My analysis is also grounded in an oral history exploration of my participation in a Jamaican revival ceremony as an invisible visible queer subject. This mode of entry offers a unique perspective on how the embodied experience of occupying spiritual spaces facilitates a complex negotiation; between the impositions of “white ways” of worship and Afro-diasporic ideologies that exist in tension with the Christian civilizing mission.

Revivalism, with its emphasis on syncretism and improvisation, subverts colonial frameworks of violence by affirming the body as a site of sacred knowledge, radical possibility, and what I call “archival weight” to attend to how the twin processes of colonialism and imperialism continue to show up in the post-independent neo-liberal moment.² Archival weight speaks to what it means to exist in spaces that renders queer identities as anomalies and thus create a discontent with the terms of cultural intelligibility. I argue that the arrival of post-independent national identity in Jamaica forecloses identity to the repertoires of heteronormativity and hypermasculinity, therefore rendering post-coloniality an empty signifier. How do Jamaican revivalism and Kumina disrupt colonial epistemologies of religious identity? Revivalism in Jamaica, for example, arose in direct response to the limits of pure colonial religious formations. Historically, it emerged from the Great Revival of 1860–61, when a religious upheaval swept the island, giving rise to new spiritual scripts occasioning vectors of existence beyond the tragic foreclosures wrought by European Christian orthodoxies.

Kumina is an Afro-spiritual movement anchored by ideological formations rooted in and routed through beliefs and practices that arrived in Jamaica by enslaved Africans and immigrants from Central Africa. From these two cultural-religious practices (Kumina and Revival), I am interested in what the queering of spirituality reveals about the potential for harmony between queerness and religiosity. How does grounding the body in spiritual spaces like Revival mediate tensions between imposed “pure Christian” modes of worship and Afro-diasporic ideologies? How does the queering of relations, movement, and cultural processes situate queer-spirituality where coloniality says it should not be? I conclude that Kumina’s attention to fluidity, pelvic freedom, and ancestral possession destabilizes colonial teleologies of gender rigidity, sexual propriety, and spiritual authenticity. In so doing, both traditions initiate temporary yet significant ruptures that redefine the conditions of Jamaican-ness by locating queerness not as a peripheral formation but integral to Afro-Jamaican spiritual identity.

Toward a Theory of “Pure Christianity”

“Pure Christianity” Revival and Kumina function as living archives that embody histories of displacement, resistance, and queer possibility. Revivalism in particular engages in a “queer spiritual praxis” of spiritual reformation by creating a performative theology that resists the moral and corporeal prescriptions of Christianity as imposed by colonial practices. This redefines Afro-diasporic religiosity not as a passive inheritance but as an active, iterative negotiation with the past and future. “Pure Christianity” in the postcolonial moment is a neo-colonial project. Christianity in its traditional form locates the Eurocentric missionary formation as the threshold of spiritual practice. The colonizers deemed the ostensibly unadulterated Protestant orthodoxy as the singular true religion that warranted the so-called “civilizing mission,” which was instigated as part of the colonial project.³ This intentionally obfuscated African belief systems, which they contoured through bigoted characterizations as “primitive and evil magic” (Stewart, 2005, p. 135). Pure Christianity then achieves its status as “pure” through its naming of African ways of worship as impure, seemingly “dark” and undiscoverable. Naming then rationalizes the Christian civilizing agenda of bringing Africans and their cultural retentions into full humanity and civilization. Sylvia Wynter’s oft-cited essay, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” critiques this dynamic by showing how colonial power weaponized Christianity as a tool of domination, instituting European culture as universal and inherently superior.

The notion of a pure (i.e., European) Christian belief system represents coloniality – an event that occasions Western values as the threshold of civilization. Wynter’s evocation is useful in mapping out a theoretical agenda that grapples with the emergence of Western humanism, where one’s method of worship determines where they are positioned on the Human-Other continuum. The emergence of Revivalism then serves two primary purposes: the insistence on African cultural retention and a syncretic working through of the creolization set into motion by conflicting encounters. A meeting in conflict underscores Jamaica’s ambivalent relation with itself. That is, ambivalence for its own history captures the forced negotiation between two competing religious formations, which underscores Revivalism as a syncretic praxis of resistance. Revivalism in Jamaica arose in direct response to the failure of “pure” colonial Christianity in aligning with the practices of spiritual plurality that characterize Black cosmological systems. The Great Revival of 1860–61, a religious upheaval that swept the island, birthed new spiritual scripts insisting on existing beyond the foreclosures wrought on by European Christian orthodoxies. If we understand Revivalism as a syncretic model, a blending of European and African religious formations, and the new form that emerges in and beyond conflict, I argue that a “queering praxis” is playing out given the ways in which enslaved, and newly freed Afro-Jamaicans created a convergence of Methodist/Baptist evangelical repertoires of worship with the African-inflected practice of spiritual possession called Myalism. This syncretic formation—including Revival Zion (and its Christian-inclinations) and Pocomania (more African-leaning, for example yodeling in the spirit) —intertwined biblical hymns and verses with spiritual possession rooted in myal, creating a rite of passage grounded in a praxis of healing.⁴

Kumina is an index in archival weight as Afro-Jamaican cosmology given its thematic particularity grounded by Pan-Africanism, Ancestral Wisdom, Coloniality, and decoloniality. That is, Kumina is a signifier that contains the historical and spiritual signification of Black epistemologies and the embodied residues of coloniality of power (Mignolo 2018, p. 111). Weight then captures the burden accompanying the act(s) of labor and an orientation toward making room for coloniality and decoloniality to exist in and out of tension. While Kumina performs the weight of a Black memory resisting interpellation into the European cultural process, it perhaps achieves its intent by equally summoning colonialisms’ countervailing systems. The late ethnomusicologist Olive Lewin asserts that Kumina is a cult movement anchored by ideological formations rooted in and routed through beliefs and practices that arrived in Jamaica by enslaved Africans and immigrants from Central Africa. Lewin cites Patterson, who historicizes “cumina” in Jamaica in his writings as early as 1730—where he describes its particularities alongside the “Dahomean ‘good’ and ‘evil’ god and ‘the Christian God and the Devil’” (Lewin 2000, p. 216). Cultural theorist Dianne Stewart argues that in Kumina ceremonies, participants call upon Kongolese gods and ancestral spirits for guidance, healing, and community protection. She observes that this practice cultivated a robust Pan-African identity among its adherents. Indeed, this upends the colonial narrative that African culture is reduced due to assimilation and violent acculturation.⁵ The decolonial outcome of this reading insists that African surrogation (to summon Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead) is present through Kumina, thus denying coloniality’s claim to total domination.⁶ Kumina’s worldview–the blurring of the boundaries between past and present, living and dead—resembles a kind of decoloniality, a queer delinking tool, yet an underdeveloped (and rarely mentioned) concept that ties Afro-Jamaicanness to a queer mode of being that is inherently Pan-African. The collapse that emanates from this convergence undercuts colonial modernity’s hold on the dichotomization of the ultimate God (capitalized) and false gods (commonized to give credence to the hierarchy that currently exists in Jamaica). This collapse creates a creolization of spirituality, thus denying any claim to a singularity of spirituality.

Figure 2: A screenshot of Hilary Carty’s pictorial representation of Kumina published in Folk Dances of Jamaica: An Insight (Carty, 1998, 68).⁷

Kumina’s fluidity and mutability are positive receptions to a queer orientation, given its contentment with gendered performance as being accessible to all without the reproduction of the discontent that often emerges when gender non-conforming and same-gender loving practices attempts to be present in white practices of spiritualism in Jamaica. Kumina brings about archival weight that reconsiders the body as a site of spiritual and erotic invitation, while ciphering black queer thought through semio-pelvic signifying. Movement is activated through the centrality of the pelvis, pushed forward, which moves laterally from side to side. This motion is not secondary; it is foundational to Kumina’s authenticity. The pelvis is not negated, nor does it hide or withdraw; it takes the lead, signaling an openness that challenges colonial norms around containment, gender rigidity, and sexual propriety. The fluidity of the movement—especially the swaying of the torso and pelvis—interrupts the militarized posture associated with colonial vertical masculinity. Instead of verticality, we see curves; instead of the immobilization of the pelvis, we see a rhythm of repeated “inching” and lateral play that suggests a queer spiritual praxis. Indeed, the body is not closed off or disciplined, but receptive and expressive, shifting between states of ancestral recall, erotic cipher, and spiritual possession. This ambiguity in movement, neither wholly masculine nor feminine, neither fully grounded nor airborne, marks Kumina as an index in black queer performance—one that unsettles binaries through the movement’s decolonial grammar. As a gesture, Kumina refuses the uprightness of the colonial subject. The forward pelvis, arched back, and responsive torso, and its accessibility to all genders, breaks from Western anatomical hierarchies and gender essentialism by relocating power through the shifting of weight. The weight of the colonial archive that so often operates in the body without notice is refuted by Kumina’s repertoire.

Participation in Revival and Kumina ceremonies foregrounds spirituality as a site of epistemic disruption and situates its practices in post-colonial thought and embodied black queer theory. The presence of queerness within these spiritual practices destabilizes Eurocentric religious hierarchies while proposing a liberatory framework as integral to Black humanity. Revival formations thus emerge as a performative act that contest and reimagine the colonial project of Western Modernity by offering temporary reparative lenses through which Afro-diasporic spirituality shapes and is shaped by the radical presence of queerness. I situate these movements within broader Afro-Caribbean traditions and Pan-African dialogues of freedom, affirming the Caribbean as a critical pole of the African diaspora. By engaging with notions of Pure Christianity, Jamaican Revival, and Kumina through embodied theory, this work contributes to critical Jamaican studies by proposing an alternative epistemology rooted in spiritual fluidity, oral history, embodied excesses, and resistance to the imperial imposition of coloniality.⁸

Queer Re-Orientations, Sexual Decoloniality, and the Spiritual (Re)writing of the Human

Queerness operates as a signifier of same-sex desire in sexual terms, and a break in/from the normative contours of gender essentialism, which expands the moral parameters of Black subjectivity. Kumina’s confluence of spirituality and identity for example, leans into the effeminate shade of masculinity via pelvic freedom. Spirituality here is a relationship to a religious practice, a way of tapping into a temporal realm to ground being and knowing in a faith systems. Narrow Christian systems historically exclude queer bodies via the partitioning of bodies (usually according to gender expression and sexuality), based upon a conjectural ideology. However, within Kumina’s decolonial spiritualism exists a radical condition of queer spiritual cryptography (a kind of sexual decoloniality) that causes a break, a rupture into spaces designated for the narrow signifying context surrounding straightness and spirituality. This break is also symbolic, a disruption of the standardized dictation of who can exist in a positive relationship to a supra-lunar being and where these interactions can occur. Praxis, with its emphasis on doing over a theoretical act (such as the existence of ideas solely in scriptocentric terms), anchors queer spirituality as one activated through participation in rituals and that participation in religious formation enacts the presence of queerness onto the body creating them as normative spiritual subjects. Put another way, the queer spiritual praxis arrives through the queer participants doing, that activates a phenomenological transformation, in this case Jamaican dance, and within that doing, its queer spiritual aesthetics destabilizes coloniality and the colonial imposition of laws restricting who can be “queer” and “spiritual.”

The materiality of a queer spiritual praxis through critical auto-ethnography indexes decoloniality which dismisses the superficiality of critical distance that characterizes Western onto-epistemology. The current Jamaican reality marked by two major historical moments, emancipation in 1838, followed by independence from Britain in 1962, warrants the question: have we arrived at sexual sovereignty, post-coloniality, and a full-fledged presence of what I am tenuously calling a “queer spiritual praxis”? Has there always been a “queer spiritual praxis,” (and thus existed in a proto-praxical manner) operating, perhaps clandestinely in traditional folk forms in Jamaica, and if so, how were these practices announced, packaged, and disseminated temporally and or repeated in a fractal-like manner?⁹ Finally, how might we consider the traditional as a practice hinging towards the destabilization of colonial spiritual epistemologies, as popular sites that reinscribe the hierarchization of orthodox spiritual formations? I am pointing to a queer spiritual praxis that functions similarly to Nadia Ellis’s application of the term in her essay “Out and Bad: Toward a Queer Performance Hermeneutic in Jamaican Dancehall” (2011). For Ellis, “queer functions as a signifier of sexual and gender non-normativity, a break in the line of gender. This may include erotic exchanges between people of the same gender but is not limited to them” (Ellis 208). The erotics of Jamaican male dancing bodies and their doings titillate a hermeneutics of sexual play and embodied excitement, yet also reveals vectors of suspicion: a kind of pre-understanding of movement exchanges as queer and non-normative. Here, I question normative assumptions about Revivalism, how it serves as a post-colonial object given its syncretic formation, and where it stands in the current moment in terms of questions surrounding African retention and the encroaching presence of coloniality wrought by the Christian Church.

Exploring “Jamaican Revivalism:” A Cultural and Spiritual Analysis

Jamaican Revivalism bracketed here centers on my personal relationship with its social, cultural, and spiritual formation. “Truth” and “reality” are forever contested—speculative theorizing positions itself, therefore, as a break away from fixed assumptions, and the complexities associated with universalism(s). This method of inquiry foregrounds the possible as a critical and heuristic engagement with Revivalism in Jamaica.

Attending church in Jamaica was a major part of my spiritual upbringing. The “individual subjectivities” (or the so-called freedom set into motion through independence) of the Jamaican child is perhaps a paradoxical ruse occasioning the little separation from the Church and its participation creates the template for anchoring modes of belonging and citizenship within them. One’s first entry into the ethics of being, a kind of crash course in racialization and coloniality, is through the spiritual formations of pure religiosity—that is, the “white” way of worshiping. But the way in which one is interpellated in this socio-ethico-religious formation (pure Christianity) denies post-colonial subjects’ reevaluation of their cultural predicament. The repetition of the colonial formation reinstates the post-Columbus “human” (the inauguration of the human and its coinciding counterparts: white bodies and their doings) as the threshold of humanity and its synonymity with European culturality. Revivalism’s break from Pure Christianity points to queer spirituality’s commitment to remaking the social order as a primary focus of its decolonial agenda. This complements queer Jamaicans’ decolonial relationship to “nature,” one that de-links and destabilizes heterosexuality’s connotation as “natural” (devoid of colonial suspicion and its ongoing discontent). Jamaican Revivalism in other words, is a site where queerness contributes to a re-formation of identity, spirituality, and sexual citizenship.

Figure 3: According to Revivalist, Denair Adlam, this image signifies an Indian Order and a ritual encompassing an amalgamation of Zion and Pocomania influences (Adlam 2025).

In Folk Dances of Jamaica: An Insight (1988), Hilary Carty writes: “Revival is an Afro-Christian religion, originating in the late nineteenth century, the time of the Great Revival.”¹⁰ This period, marked by widespread spiritual fervor, arrived as a response to the socio-economic struggles and cultural disruptions faced by African-descended Jamaicans in slavery and post-slavery contexts. The Great Revival brought about a fusion of African spiritual practices with European Christian traditions, creating a syncretic amalgamation of seemingly disparate religious repertoires, but also created the conditions where marginalized communities could assert their identity and seek empowerment through faith. Carty elaborates that in contemporary Jamaica, the term “Revival” refers to two distinct religious traditions: Pocomania and Zion. Historically, the term initially described the Zionist tradition, which adhered more closely to the tenets of the Great Revival. This duality reflects the syncretic nature of Jamaican culture—a merging of African spirituality and European Christian practices. Before embarking on a field trip to a Revival church in August Town, Kingston, Jamaica, in fulfilling a cultural anthropological understanding of Revival for an undergraduate course in Caribbean Culture in performance, several questions preoccupied my mind. I wondered if my preconceptions, shaped by societal myths about Revivalism as a form of obeah or witchcraft, would hold true. What are the historical and cultural roots of Revival? How are these ceremonies structured, and what is their significance? Motivated by these inquiries, discussions with individuals familiar with Revival ceremonies revealed practices such as “readings” about participants’ lives and instances of physical engagement, such as being “whipped” by the shepherd. As we approached the church, the sight of a sign prohibiting women from wearing pants or sleeveless blouses immediately signaled that Revival practices were governed by distinct protocols, differing significantly from other Christian denominations.

The church’s entrance was marked by a “seal”—a ritual object consisting of water, a bottle holding a candle, and specific instructions to walk around it three times counterclockwise. This ritual parallels practices in other Afro-Caribbean and African traditions, such as the Yoruba custom of encircling sacred spaces to invoke protection or spiritual alignment. These shared elements highlight the continuity of cultural practices across the African diaspora, emphasizing a deep-rooted connection to ancestral traditions and their symbolic significance. Upon entering the church, the vibrant and symbolic decor heightened my anticipation. The healing pool at the center of the space, adorned with representations of mermaids (mother, father, and children), combs, brushes, perfumes, and a bell, immediately stood out. Olive Lewin’s Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica (2000) emphasizes the significance of water as a purifying and healing force in Afro-Jamaican traditions. The pool’s central placement underscored its importance as a site of spiritual transformation. Adjacent elements, such as machetes for “clearing” evil spirits and seven candles symbolizing divine completeness, further enriched the space’s layered symbolism. Sylvia Wynter’s We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture (2022) offers a critical framework for understanding Revivalism’s performative and spiritual dimensions. Wynter highlights the cultural significance of ritual as a means of negotiating identity and history.¹¹ This perspective resonated as I observed the interplay of colors within the church. Colors had specific symbolisms; red signified the blood of Christ, gold represented holiness and divine power. The inclusion of the “bandana,” or madras, hinted at Indian influences, underscoring Revivalism’s creolized nature.

The Revival service followed a structured sequence. The “singspiration” phase involved congregational singing of choruses such as “He Alone Is Worthy,” creating a unified atmosphere of worship. The shepherd, with his head wrapped, assumed a commanding presence as he led songs like “Oh Come to My Soul Blessed Jesus.” This invocation mirrored what Lewin describes as “calling down the spirits” through music—a practice rooted in African traditions of communal spirituality, and a kind antiphonal call and response. As the ceremony progressed, the boundaries between the physical and spiritual blurred. A woman was in a trance, lifting her hands skyward and swaying rhythmically. Her movements were guided by an amor bearer, whose role, according to Revival tradition, is to support individuals navigating the spirit realm. This moment exemplified the embodied nature of Revival worship, where spirituality manifests through physical expression. A significant moment occurred when the shepherd performed a ritual with a grapefruit, symbolic of healing and renewal. He mixed its contents with Kananga water, cream soda, and olive oil while invoking divine power through prayer.¹² This act exemplified what Sylvia Wynter describes as “symbolic representation”—ritual objects and actions serving as conduits for spiritual energy.

The Revival space, with its fluid interplay of roles and identities, invites a reflection on how queer presence might emerge within its practices. For instance, the shepherd’s performative gestures—ranging from stern authority to theatrical flair—challenge conventional norms of masculinity, creating space for fluid expressions of gender and identity. Additionally, the communal emphasis on spiritual alignment and emotional vulnerability within the congregation fosters an inclusive environment where individuals, regardless of their sexual or gender identities, can connect with the divine. This potential for subverting rigid binaries aligns with the broader Afro-Jamaican tradition of embracing multiplicity and resisting dominant paradigms. The shepherd’s performative gestures, oscillating between stern authority and theatrical flair, challenge traditional notions of masculinity. The congregation’s emphasis on communal connection and spiritual fluidity provides a space where rigid binaries dissolve, making room for diverse expressions of identity. Revivalism, much like other Afro-Jamaican traditions, holds the potential for subverting dominant paradigms and embracing multiplicity.

Figure 4: This is Revivalist Denair Adlam posing in front of Revival paraphernalia (Adlam 2025).

This is revivalist Denair Adlam, presented here in Revival apparel. I asked Adlam two questions using a snowball research framework: How is Revivalism treated as an incorrect way of worship? How is homosexuality received in Revivalism opposed to other religious formations in Jamaica? For Adlam:

Majority of Revival churches do not discriminate about persons with their sexuality, we accept everyone for who they are. We as Revival do not change or try to change persons for their sexuality for which they prefer that’s their personal life — it doesn’t have nothing to do with the church itself. So that’s why you would find a lot of young persons drawn to Revival churches especially if they are gay, because it’s one of the denomination[s] that doesn’t discriminate [against] persons. Other denomination[s] will discriminate about it, especially if the pastor of the Revival faith is homosexual… other denominations will say it is not right so you will get bashing from it (Adlam 2025).

Adlam reforms Christian characterological architecture and religious practices to make room for the confluence of the sexual and spiritual. Later, I will explore how the Revival movement vocabulary functions as a point of departure from traditional norms, but for now, I will focus on how Adlam’s statement moves against settler colonial ideological state apparatuses. This causes the discriminatory regimen of coloniality to exist in thought, not as a regulation of bodies who should and should not participate in this religious agenda. Adlam’s photo diffuses glamour. Here he strikes a pose of queer spiritual positivity that moves into the formation of onto-epistemological disobedience, re-choreographing language and structure while creating the conditions to authorize the revivalist’s place in Jamaica’s spiritual formation. Meaning, the photo dances revivalism in embodied and theoretical terms. In queer spiritual terms, Adlam endows the photo and the written text that follows with the spirit of Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening, opening the image’s intertextuality to resist Western extractionism, queer disappearance, and neo-colonial epistemicity by procuring an image-sonic insistence on queerness as spiritual and the spiritual as queer.¹³ To re-choreograph then, is to de-center the logo-structures of being to foreground the affective first, then the theoretical after—to expand modes of being queer and human.

My observation of Revivalism reveals economies of queer signifying practices, much like Denair Adlam’s performance of queer spirituality. These practices operate in convergence rather than divergence, challenging the discontent often associated with the non-normativity ascribed to Black queer spirituality. Within this desired convergence, a queer spiritual praxis finds its grounding—a fluid and unencumbered space where identity, spirituality, and community intersect. Temporary sensations of a queer spiritual praxis are evinced in Jamaican Revival given its potential to respond to Rinaldo Walcott’s call for emancipation that does not reproduce neocolonial trapping.¹⁴ The tradition’s emergence during the 19th century, marked by the establishment of the Zionist belief system in 1860 and the Pocomania tradition in 1861—which maintains a closer relationship to African spiritual practices. Revival offers a site where the legacies of colonialism and African spirituality meet, creating a space that doesn’t shun same-sex auto-eroticism and gender non-conforming expressions. The possibility of a queer spiritual praxis is vividly evident in the embodiment of the shepherd, whose characteristics would traditionally be read as effeminate, particularly within spaces heavily regulated by hypermasculinity. The shepherd’s feminized demeanor (his fluid movement across the sacred space, his sharp, deliberate head turns, and his effortless glide) serves as an intentional performance of focus and charisma. This cadence and elegance bear a striking resemblance to the energy foregrounded in drag performances but framed within the spiritual dimensions of Revival as crucial to a queer spiritual praxis. The coolness of his character contrasts with the roughness often associated with traditional masculinity, subtly challenging the politicization of masculinity as the gateway to heterosexuality.

The queer spiritual praxis in Jamaican Revival is not simply a performance. It operates within a broader relational web between the pastor, the congregation, and the divine. In another Revival setting, a more pronounced queer spiritual praxis can be observed through my direct relationship with a pastor who Shepherds a Revival church in Kingston, Jamaica. Trevor Johnson’s embodiment of queerness goes beyond gender performativity and fluidity—it includes same-sex desiring tendencies that, while not explicitly spoken, are evident in his demeanor and interpersonal engagements. Yet, this does not diminish his spiritual authority or the congregation’s faith in him. Mr. Johnson’s performativity reflects an intricate negotiation of identity within a deeply spiritual framework. His fluidity, particularly in voice—effortlessly shifting between high-pitched resonance and deep, authoritative tones (flexing his lower register)—further challenges conventional expectations of masculinity within pastoral formations. His vocal dynamism, far from undermining his authority, enhances his connection to the congregation, allowing him to act as an effective intermediary between the temporal and spiritual worlds. The way that Mr. Johnson is able to command spiritual authority while layering aesthetics of fluidity and mutability in terms of gender performances, offer fleeting possibilities of a queer spiritual praxis, beyond theoretical abstraction.

Pastor Johnson’s queerness is intricately tied to his relationship with the divine. His embodiment of femininity, expressed through nuanced gestures, vocal inflections, and a charismatic presence, becomes a lever for spiritual expression. The congregation’s acceptance of this queer spiritual praxis, even if implicit, reveals the complex interplay between spirituality and identity within Jamaican Revival. The embodiment of a queer spiritual praxis as markedly represented through the pastor’s spiritual-political practice, challenges the discontent that often arise at this positive convergence. His politics reject the fixed binary frameworks imposed by coloniality. His fluid gender presentation and same-sex desiring tendencies are not erased or hidden; rather, they are integrated into his spiritual identity, creating a model for how queerness can exist within and enhance religious spaces. Ultimately, the arrival of a queer spiritual praxis within Jamaican Revival is not just a performance of identity but crucially reimagines the relationship between spirituality, gender, and black life. The pastor’s ability to navigate these intersections, while maintaining the trust and respect of his congregation, underscores the resilience and adaptability of Revival as a cultural and spiritual practice. His presence affirms that queerness is not an aberration within these spiritual spaces but a vital component and addition to its vibrancy and inclusivity.

One final point could be made to foreground the queer spiritual praxis emanating from Jamaican Revival: its sound. The power of the thoracic resonator and the ways in which the use of sound, through guttural expressions, operates in a queer spiritual context given its distinct way of channeling spiritual energies. Queering the sound “eh eh—eh eh,” coupled with a tarrying with its cadence as if waiting for something to happen, creates a seemingly strange effect. The strangeness of the sound and its attention to the throat allows me to make the claim that a peculiar erotic undertone is being evoked especially when read in a Queer contemporary performance context. My interpretation of the guttural sound in a queer context as evocative of a non-normative eroticism aligns with the broader framework of Lyndon K. Gill’s Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (2018), where the erotic is conceptualized beyond normative sexual acts and into the realm of affect, sound, and embodiment. The guttural “eh eh—eh eh” and its tarrying nature suggests an interruption, an anticipatory delay that queers temporality and embodiment, rendering the erotic as something other than purely genital-focused or heteronormatively codified. Gill contends that the erotic requires an engagement with affective and embodied practices that resists colonial and normative constraints. He writes: “If our erotic knowledge; requires that we attend to the political and spiritual alongside sensuality, intimacy, feeling, affection, empathy, and love, then the erotic as mere euphemism for sex or even sensuality cannot persist.”¹⁵ This aligns with the queer spiritual praxis this essay wants to pursue. Gill insists on an expansive understanding of the erotic—one that refuses to be reduced to genital sexuality or normative expressions of desire. Instead, it foregrounds the erotic as a deeply affective, embodied, and political practice that is also bound up with spirituality. The guttural sounds—especially in their iterative, throaty cadence—suggest a kind of erotic attunement that is not only about normative pleasure but also generates an affective, embodied connection to the divine, to community, and to the self. The way these sounds tarry and linger, resisting a singular resolution, enacts a queering of time, space, and spiritual expectation. It is precisely in this waiting, in the strangeness of sound and bodily engagement, that the erotic emerges—not just as a site of desire, but as a space of political, affective, and spiritual resistance.

Toward a Queer Spiritual Praxis in Kumina

The transformation that arrives in Jamaican Revivalism is the same transformation that reverberates in Kumina. While a kind of spiritual manifestation is activated via the trumping step in Revival or what Carty describes as “the build-up to possession” it is the inching step in Kumina that creates the conditions for spiritual activation/manifestation (Carty 1988, p. 68). In Jamaican revivalism, there exist practices resembling backphrasing or tarrying with and through the spirit–and a timeless waiting/weighting with anticipation for a desired spiritual outcome–so ideally the slowing down of time that minimally announces the threshold of possession. Spiritual possession then arrives when the participant’s body gives way to the spirit. The participant in the revival who happens to be queer does not have to think queerly in the moment, nor is the colonial discriminatory logic reincarnated in order to demonize various movement patterns. A similar embodied labor of tarrying in the spirit in a backphrasing operative is carried over into Kumina and made possible through the bareness of the feet on the ground allowing ancestral spirits to travel through the feet and take possession of the participant’s body.

Kumina technique in simple terms, starts with the feet placed firmly on the floor aiming to ground the body to earth usually throughout its ritualizing schedule. The dancer must create a kind of curve with the toes tightly together that forces the heel to move the body forward. The knees must be slightly bent, while the pelvis is thrusted forward. With the elbows bent allowing the forearm to come forward, the argumentative stance is initiated. This initiation activates a queer gesture, where depending on the apparel of the male mover, the evidence of the male bodies phallic bulge endows movement with erotic play and spiritual call and response. The mover, who might recognize the presence of the bulge cares little about being watched, nor the possibility of gazing clandestinely on other phallic bulges in the space. The conditions are created to watch and be watched while being visited by ancestral spirits.

Fleeting presence of queerness arrives in Kumina (not as an inherently queer aesthetic but situated through a queer praxis) given its ability to draw on the ancestral wisdom given to us in a codified manner by enslaved Africans, who, in a sense labored against the tide of “new world unfamiliarity” and the atrocities associated with enslavement. Most importantly, in Kumina, the claim I am making is that the body of the participant is not “queer” in the sense that the contemporary moment that allowed queerness to emerge while simultaneously shaming them is not operating in the time bracketed in this moment. In that sense, Kumina has the potential to destabilize “colonial time” (one that limits cultural intelligibility and humanity to white bodies and European Cultures) or the coloniality of queerness creating a new time that is Black. The destabilization of colonial time concurrently gives way to a Black time that embraces the multiplicity of queerness and resists coloniality’s postponement of Blackness’s full arrival in Jamaica.

I am also contending that Kumina is Afro-Jamaican (in the sense that it provides glimpses of a precolonial moment that is receptive to the broad capacities of gender and sexuality)—but not nearly as compelling as argued by Keguro Macharia, who places queerness in Africa prior to Colonial Modernity’s obfuscation of black ways of being and knowing. The ability to reframe gender and sexuality beyond the eyes of colonial modernity, is destabilized in the Black time created by Kumina by offering a temporary departure from the attempted fixing of gender and sexual typology. To participate in Kumina provides the conditions for queerness to not simply be highlighted as a category to be included for the sake of scoring political points, or as an add-on to create performative erotics of diversity: it is already a crucial element of what makes Kumina a peculiar Afro-Caribbean practice. The unrestrictions on the hip and the pelvic girdle, accessible to all participants regardless of gender, sexual, and religious identity, creates a queer typology on the bodies of those existing within the ethos of Kumina. Thus, queerness arrives with a peculiar shade that does not shame the members who occupies the queer category—unlike Jamaican Dancehall that assumes a neo-colonial character where queerness summons its former demons and re-creates its ontological incarnation of queerness as a force incongruous with the scripts anchoring sexual ethics (McDonald, 2023).¹⁶ It would be easier to say that Kumina is queer and queer is Kumina, but that would only reproduce identitarian issues wrought on by coloniality. Instead, the queer spiritual praxis previously described is represented here in such a way that there need not be a meta-cognitive practice when inhabiting the space of Kumina. By this, I mean the participant does not have to think about his queerness being a potential problem when pulled into a myal or the pinnacle of possession. He is fully human, by default, in Kumina, not separated by his queer identity—which achieves the “new human” that Sylvia Wynter is after.¹⁷

A Conclusion: Kumina as a Decolonial Cultural Process: Inching as a Site of Queer Spiritual Praxis

A primary aspect of the decolonizing nature embedded in Jamaica’s cultural process is a way in which Africanicity is maintained in and through the cult movement of Kumina. Kumina is one of the many African spiritual cultural forms that survived the colonizers’ attempt at exiling African gods and the culture in which they were summoned.¹⁸ This is not without the psychological pressures of the new world order combined with the rigidity of the Christian orthodoxies that banned dancing. For instance, Kumina draws inspiration from the Congo step, characterized by moving on the flat of one foot and pushing off with the other foot, often accompanied by forward shuffling steps, whirling, twisting, virtuosic breaks, high kicks, and turns. This analysis underscores a persistent recognition of the African spirit in Jamaica and its significance in the continuation of indigenous ontologies and performance epistemologies. Here, Afro-indigenous onto-epistemology is set into motion—this process, of course, refers to the adaptation or modification of foreign concepts, technologies, practices, and institutions to suit local cultural or physical conditions. Indigenisation is often seen in post-colonial societies, where there’s an attempt to reclaim and affirm local cultural identities and traditions that were suppressed during the colonial period. In the context of Kumina, indigenisation might refer to the way African cultural practices were adapted to the circumstances of life in the Caribbean.

Inching in Kumina initiates an invitation to move and forward a thought via the feet’s grounding in earth. Earthness re-positions the black body in relation to nature to foreground an ecological constellation of black humanism, insisting on its own man-nature relationship while denying the Western law-like authorization of white European bodies as the ideal. Groundedness then provides the conditions for the ancestors to travel through the feet and take possession (position) of/in the body, highlighting the body’s commitment to submission, a submission that procures the transfer of recognizable consciousness to create a new kind of indigenous consciousness; one not immediately visible within the normative contours of Western hermeneutic systems of meaning making. Thus, through its emphasis, on indigeneity, Kumina queers spiritual relations, queerifies theory in my act of rendering it into text, queers onto-epistemology through expanding its depth beyond colonial obfuscation. The evaluation that Kumina sets into motion is one of independence and reevaluation, activating promises of sovereignty and post-coloniality beyond the uneven reproduction of interculturality and forced assimilation. To center Kumina as a site of indigeneity and core spiritual relations in Jamaica is to problematize being, knowing, intimacy, identity, and structure. The labor that comes with inching—the gripping of the floor with closely held toes—places movement under conditions of intellectual labor, while also refusing to reproduce the bifurcated discourse between logocentric models of thought and the so-called anti-intellectual ascription of movement as thought, by recognizing movement itself as initiating and generating knowledge.

This labor of moving in this stance points to Black ontology and epistemology proper. Arriving concurrently with inching, movement summons knowledge, knowledge emerges by thrusting the hip forward, thereby emphasizing the phallic bulge of the male body. In slipping away from the uprightness associated with European verticality or the balletic body in performance, inching emphasizes the excessive use of the bottom, creating an invitation to be eroticized, inviting the watcher to form a queer-like relationship with the performer. This relationship deliberately avoids reproducing the discontent ascribed to the bottom, instead facilitates a refiguration of erotic excess allowing Kumina to operate at the axis of past and present, reincarnating a kind of pre-colonial gender fluidity, even as it remains unfinished in the neo-liberal post-colonial moment. To read objects through the prism of a cultural process—Kumina and Revival and their resistance to colonial hegemony—a queer spiritual practice, is not simply a theoretical exercise in search of the presence of fluidity, continuity, and discontinuity. Put another way, deciphering queerness in these cultural objects required placing a queer imperative in spaces where historically queerness is erased through structural delimitations on history and cultural memory. Writing as black, queer, and Jamaican then necessitates my attention to these peculiar tools in order to cipher and decipher queerness and blackness with a porous and molecular approach. Inching and the bottom as a site of queer hermeneutics might not exist as the primary point of view of critical dance historiographers (specifically traditional folk forms a queer hermeneutics), yet I investigated and interpreted it here through traversing experience and memory as a site of queerness, an index in enigmatic contemplation of the tensions between “queerness,” “blackness,” and “Jamaicanness.” Inching thus does the work of moving with the phantasma of painful recalls, but with an imperative of freedom that deemphasizes coloniality. The structural placement of the toes gripping of earth and its criticality in activating the rest of the body attributes the time signature ascribed to queer arrival in Jamaica. The space between past and present is situated in the moment of inching, taking temporal and atemporal stances occasioning a thinking-about-change as a confrontation with structures that compel and resist change. This is why inching inches toward gender fluidity and the decolonialization of erotic excess as an initiation of change.

The practice of Revivalism points to a queer spirituality praxis in the way that Denair Adlam and Pastor Trevor Johnson insist on and maintaining a spiritual relationship with God. Repertoires such as the fluid interplay of roles and identities reflect the presence of queerness. Johnson’s embodiment of performative gestures—such as stern authority to theatrical flair—poses a challenge to conventional norms of masculinity, expanding its reach to other expressions of gender and identity. As previously mentioned, both participants’ involvement in communal gathering around spiritual manifestation are not contingent on their sexual orientation nor gender expression. They connect with the divine while being queer. The space of gathering around spiritual thought and practice destabilizes pure religious insistence on maintaining the heteronormative matrix as a critical component in aligning with “authentic” spirituality. The decoloniality that characterizes spiritual plurality, then, provides the conditions where rigid binaries dissolve, making room for other modes of being one with the spirit. Revivalism and Kumina, when routed through queer spiritual thought, subvert dominant paradigms of worship, delinking their association with the coloniality of spirituality, embracing spiritual plurality.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Thomas F. DeFrantz, Micaela Brinsley and the editors, who provided very helpful feedback on previous drafts of this essay.

Author Biography

Dr. Webster McDonald holds a BFA in Theatre Arts from the Edna Manley College School of Drama, A Master of Arts Degree from Emerson College, and a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Kansas.

Dr. McDonald theorizes a queer, Black Jamaican, post-colonial subjectivity to subvert normative cultural discourses like colonialism, anti-Blackness, and hegemonic masculinity. His book project Archival Weight: Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Performance of Black and Queer Life in Jamaica, considers “archival weight” both as a metaphor and as a material reality: the weight of history bearing down on the body, embedded in the state, and circulating through culture. Archival Weight offers an interdisciplinary and decolonial inquiry into how the past lives on/in the flesh and futures of Black queer subjects. The juridical, ontological, popular, and spiritual dimensions of archival weight are each given analysis: from colonial laws and national archives of sex and citizenship to the categories of human ontology, to the haunting presence of spirits and ancestors. The result is a project that not only theorizes “weight” as a key paradigm for understanding Black queer life in Jamaica, but also performs a kind of weight-lifting: imagining, through performance, how we carry, redistribute, or shed the burdens of history in an orientation toward freedom.

Dr. McDonald has presented scholarly works in the US, Iceland, Canada, the UK, and parts of the Caribbean. He is a co-author of the anthology “Dubbin Monodrama Anthology I: Black Masculinities in African Diaspora Theatre” (2019) author of the essay “Scripts of Sexual Ethics: Tensions With/In the Performance of Jamaican Citizenship” (Caribbean Studies, Volume 51, 2023). He also has a book chapter, “Scripts of Maleness: Tensions Within Homosexual Performances in Jamaican National Identity,” in “Caribbean Men in the Arts: Demystifying Masculinities,” edited by Keino Senior and Opal Palmer (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024.Dr. McDonald previously joined Northwestern University’s Slippage lab as the 2024–2025 Postdoctoral Affiliate supported by the Mellon Foundation grant, Black Social Dance and Geographies of Freedom, where he is co-editing the anthology “Black Social Dance: Embodied Geographies of Freedom” with Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Kansas.