I presented on affect, theology, and Indigenous futures at Drew Theological School’s 15th Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, “Affectivity and Divinity: Affect Theories and Theologies.” My text is forthcoming in Fordham University Press’ Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia series. In “Writing Affect and Theology in Indigenous Futures,” I reckon with renderings of affect that figure subject- or world-making forces as pre-personal or infra-linguistic (a constellation of ways of thinking through/with affect as movement beyond the sedimentations of language) as citational and conceptual patternings that orient how beings and their knowings are made-capable of arriving in theory. I aim to disrupt the orbit of affect theories and/as theologies that, however alert to the coloniality of Western knowledge practices, lay claim to material and conceptual territories of animate worlds in ways that curb Indigenous futures.

Affectivity and Divinity:
Affect Theories and Theologies
15th Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium
March 18—20, 2016
Drew Theological School

Mathew Arthur, “Writing Affect and Theology in Indigenous Futures,” in eds. Karen Bray and Stephen Moore, ​Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies​, (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2019).