Burning Spear and Nathaniel Mackey at Large

Chapter 4 reads interlocking essays and fiction by the African American poet, critic, and novelist Nathaniel Mackey alongside the signal work of the reggae musician Burning Spear, the album Marcus Garvey. Mackey’s and Burning Spear’s contributions to the book’s propositions of queer diasporic affinity is in the trope of spirit possession, an aesthetic that presents the most radical elsewhere of all. For here is a subjective state with an extremely untethered relationship to normative time and an expansive reach beyond the strictures of geographical reason.