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 cognitive alterity and invite us into alternative ontologies. The author brings together the work of Keewaydinoquay Peschel, an Anishinaabeg elder, with that of Adelle Davis, a leading health and wellness figure from Los Angeles, both writing in the 1960s and 1970s on psychedelics. The author reads these figures through the lens of contemporary writers and theorists Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira to draw connections between Indigenous ontologies with the aesthetics of psychedelic experiences. The author looks at how psychedelic aesthetics provide affective maps, guideposts for cognitive, somatic, and affective processing that serve as sites of transformation, and examines the paradigm‐shifting possibilities that can be enacted through readers’ engagement with such texts. Through their psychedelic stories and performance, the author argues that readers are invited to imagine new possibilities for navigating our lives with greater awareness of our interconnection within wider ecological and metaphysical systems.
Psychedelic Affective Maps for New Ecological Futures Available to Purchase
Lana Cook is associate director of the Systems Awareness Lab, a research effort to study ongoing systems change efforts in education, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research explores the use of aesthetics and narrative forms to express awareness and change processes across individual, relational, and collective levels. Prior to this work, Cook has worked as a strategist at MIT Open Learning, incubating new initiatives in digital learning and inclusive education, including the Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) and Emerging Talent programs. Cook earned a doctorate in English at Northeastern University, with a focus on contemporary American literature, cinema studies and visual culture, where she was a 2014 Humanities Center fellow, investigating different iterations and meanings of virality. She received her bachelor's from University of New Hampshire in English and philosophy. Her work appears in the edited Chacruna anthology Women and Psychedelics (2024), Configurations, Forced Migration Review, and other venues. She is a certified master practitioner in compassionate systems awareness.
Lana Cook; Psychedelic Affective Maps for New Ecological Futures. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 2025; 124 (2): 325–349. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11626625
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