Our work throughout the project has been inspired and informed by a wide range of material: from performances and videos to books and articles, spanning many different disciplines. Some have become core resources for us, serving as starting points for dialogues, residencies and collaborations, as well as for our own ongoing research.
Many have been shared with us by participants in these events. To extend this exchange of thought and practice, we share here an evolving list of such resources, and, if possible, links to where you can access them.
We also invite you to share with us resources you think might interest us and add to our own compilation. All suggestions welcome at possession.automation@gmail.com
Allen-Paisant, Jason. “Aimé Césaire: Possession as Paradigm of Consciousness.” Cultural Critique 117.1 (2022): 1-27.
Allen-Paisant, Jason. Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Austin, David. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal. Between the Lines, 2023.
Balds, Treena. “Krapp’s Last Tape and Breath as Algorithmic Performances: A Heuristic.” TDR/The Drama Review 63.4 (2019): 57-65.
Bartell, Brian. “The Political Ecology of James and Grace Lee Boggs.” Rethinking Marxism 33.3 (2021): 396-414.
Blackman, Lisa. Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Blackwell-Pal, Jaswinder. “The ‘System’of Service” in Arnold-Forster, Agnes, and Alison Moulds, eds. Feelings and Work in Modern History: Emotional Labour and Emotions about Labour (2022): 215.
Bolden, Tony. Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk. University Press of Mississippi, 2020.
Boyle, Michael Shane. The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2024.
Brar, Dhanveer Singh. Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: Sonic Ecologies of Black Life. Goldsmiths University Press, 2021.
Carter, Derrais. “Black Wax(ing): On Gil Scott-Heron and the Walking Interlude.” M/C Journal 21.4 (2018).
Castor, N. Fadeke. “Ifá/Orisha Digital Counterpublics.” The Black Scholar 52.3 (2022): 17-29.
Castor, N. Fadeke. Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifa in Trinidad. Duke University Press, 2017.
Chingonyi, Kayo. A Blood Condition. Random House, 2021.
Eckersall, Peter. Dramaturgy to Make Visible: The Legacies of New Dramaturgy for Politics and Performance in Our Times. Taylor & Francis, 2024.
Franklin, Seb. Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic. MIT Press, 2015.
Franklin, Seb. The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. U of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Garriga-López, Adriana María. “Debt, Crisis, and Resurgence in Puerto Rico.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 24.2 (2020): 122-132.
Glick, Jeremy Matthew. The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. NYU Press, 2016.
Gotman, Kélina. Choreomania: Dance and Disorder. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Harris, Laura. Experiments in Exile: CLR James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness. Fordham University Press, 2018.
Johnson, Paul Christopher. “An Atlantic Genealogy of “Spirit Possession”.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53.2 (2011): 393-425.
Johnson, Paul Christopher. Automatic religion: Nearhuman agents of Brazil and France. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Johnson, Paul Christopher, ed. Spirited Things: The Work of” Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Kamugisha, Aaron. Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. Indiana University Press, 2019.
Lim, Alvin Eng Hui. “Wangye Practices Online: From Burning Effigy Vessels to Digital Networks.” Global Networks 23.3 (2023): 659-673.
Llana, Jazmin Badong. “Sugar Overflows and Teatro Obrero’s Escalante Story.” Theatre Research International 43.1 (2018): 63-82.
Lordi, Emily J. The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s. Duke University Press, 2020.
McClanahan, Annie. “Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory.” After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (2022): 192-208.
McGlotten, Shaka. “Black Data.” No tea, No shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (2016): 262-86.
Mullings, Beverley. “Caliban, Social Reproduction and our Future Yet to Come.” Geoforum 118 (2021): 150-158.
Okoth, Christine. “Peripheral Labor.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 68.1 (2022): 117-140.
Opperman, Romy. “Charles Mills’s “Black Trash”: Reproducing Race, Pig Waste, and Ecological Resistance.” Critical Philosophy of Race 12.2 (2024): 261-291.
Ramayya, Nisha. States of the Body Produced by Love. Ignota Books, 2019.
Rekret, Paul. Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis. Goldsmiths Press, 2024.
Ridout, Nicholas. Scenes From Bourgeois Life. University of Michigan Press, 2020.
Royster, Francesca. Sounding Like a No No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post Soul Era. University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Stanger, Arabella. Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theater Dance. Northwestern University Press, 2021.
Stephens, Elizabeth. “Affect and Automation: A Critical Genealogy of the Emotions.” Emotions in Late Modernity. Routledge, 2019. 176-189.
Strongman, Roberto. “Transcorporeality in Vodou.” Journal of Haitian Studies (2008): 4-29.
Tancons, Claire. “Curating Carnival? Performance in Contemporary Caribbean Art.” Curating in the Caribbean (2012): 37-63.
Thomas, Deborah A. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. Duke University Press, 2019.
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “Sweetness, Capacity, Energy.” American Quarterly 71.3 (2019): 849-856.
Ward, Stephen M. “An Ending and a Beginning: James Boggs, CLR James, and The American Revolution.” Souls 13.3 (2011): 279-302.
Young, Martin. “In Memory of the Q-File: Spontaneity, Digital Automation, and Deskilling in Theatre Lighting.” TDR 68.1 (2024): 143-156.
Benanav, Aaron. Automation and the Future of Work. Verso Books, 2020.
Beller, Jonathan. The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism. Duke University Press, 2021.
Boggs, James. American Revolution. NYU Press, 1963.
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. NYU Press, 1998.
Dyer-Witheford, Nick, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, and James Steinhoff. Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. Pluto Press, 2019.
Franklin, Seb. Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic. MIT Press, 2015.
Franklin, Seb. The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. U of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Routledge, 2013.
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso Books, 2015.
Mueller, Gavin. Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites are Right about Why you Hate your Job. Verso Books, 2021.
Noble, David. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. Routledge, 2017.
Pasquinelli, Matteo. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. Verso Books, 2023.
Pink, Sarah, et al. Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Taylor & Francis, 2022.
Pollock, Friedrich. Automation. Europäische Verlag Anst., 1956.
Resnikoff, Jason. Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work. University of Illinois Press, 2022.
Routhier, Dominique. With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation. Verso Books, 2023.
Smith, Jason E. Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation. Reaktion Books, 2020.
Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. John Wiley & Sons, 2017.
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a world without Work. Verso Books, 2015.
Wiener, Norbert. Human Use of Human Beings. Doubleday & Company, 1954.
Adensamer, Angelika, and Lukas Daniel Klausner. ““Part Man, Part Machine, All Cop”: Automation in Policing.” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 4 (2021): 655486.
Bartell, Brian. “The Political Ecology of James and Grace Lee Boggs.” Rethinking Marxism 33.3 (2021): 396-414.
Bassett, Caroline, and Ben Roberts. “Automation now and then: automation fevers, anxieties and utopias.” New Formations 98.98 (2019): 9-28.
Bender, Emily M., et al. “On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency. 2021.
Cheney-Lippold, John. “A new algorithmic identity: Soft biopolitics and the modulation of control.” Theory, culture & society 28.6 (2011): 164-181.
Engster, Frank, and Phoebe V. Moore. “The search for (artificial) intelligence, in capitalism.” Capital & Class 44.2 (2020): 201-218.
Franklin, Seb. “Logical circuitry—perverse circuitry.” Cultural Dynamics 35.4 (2023): 280-290.
Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. “Orientalism and informatics: alterity from the chess-playing Turk to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.” Ex-position 43 (2020): 45.
Goodfriend, Sophia. “Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron’s Old City.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 55.3 (2023): 461-478.
Johnson, Cedric. “James Boggs, the “Outsiders,” and the challenge of Postindustrial Society.” Souls 13.3 (2011): 303-326.
Morozov, Evgeny. “Digital Socialism?” New Left Review
Nakamura, Lisa. “Indigenous circuits: Navajo women and the racialization of early electronic manufacture.” American Quarterly 66.4 (2014): 919-941.
Parisi, Luciana. “Critical computation: Digital automata and general artificial thinking.” Theory, Culture & Society 36.2 (2019): 89-121.
Parisi, Luciana. “The alien subject of AI.” Subjectivity 12 (2019): 27-48.
Righi, Andrea. “From targets to matches: The digital anatomy-politics of neoliberal sexuality.” Cultural Critique 98 (2018): 95-121.
Van der Linden, Marcel. “Re-constructing the origins of modern labor management.” Labor History 51.4 (2010): 509-522.
Ward, Stephen M. “An Ending and a Beginning: James Boggs, CLR James, and The American Revolution.” Souls 13.3 (2011): 279-302.
Whittaker, Meredith. “Origin stories: Plantations, computers, and industrial control.” Logic (s) 19 (2023).
Widder, David Gray, Sarah West, and Meredith Whittaker. “Open (for business): Big tech, concentrated power, and the political economy of open AI.” Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI (August 17, 2023) (2023).
Barua, Maan. Plantation Worlds. Duke University Press, 2024.
Beckford, George L. Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World. University of the West Indies Press, 1999.
Best, Lloyd, and Kari Levitt. Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Development. University of the West Indies Press, 2009.
Burnard, Trevor, and John Garrigus. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Henry, Paget. Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. Psychology Press, 2000.
James, CL.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Vintage, 1989.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin, 1986.
Nesbitt, Nick. The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean. University of Virginia Press, 2022.
Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Harvard University Press, 2019.
Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Duke University Press, 2004.
Thomas, Deborah A. Political life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. Duke University Press, 2019.
Tomich, Dale W., ed. The Politics of the Second Slavery. SUNY Press, 2016.
Woods, Clyde. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. Verso Books, 2017.
Beckford, George L. “The social economy of bauxite in the Jamaican man-space.” Social and Economic Studies (1987): 1-55.
Bosman, Ulbe, and Kris Manjapra. “Metaphorical Overtures of Freedom and the Plantation Complex.” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 3.1 (2022): 191-214.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “Caribbean Man in Space and Time.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 25.3 (2021): 90-104
Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “The Plantationocene and the Performative Commons: A Brief History of Uncommoning.” Minnesota Review 2019.93 (2019): 83-93.
Fiori, Nicholas. “Plantation energy: From slave labor to machine discipline.” American Quarterly 72.3 (2020): 559-579.
Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental humanities 6.1 (2015): 159-165.
Jegathesan, Mythri. “Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology’s “Regional Closets”.” Feminist Anthropology 2.1 (2021): 78-93.
McKittrick, Katherine. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17.3 (42) (2013): 1-15.
Moore, Jason W. “Sugar and the expansion of the early modern world-economy: Commodity frontiers, ecological transformation, and industrialization.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) (2000): 409-433.
Muñiz Varela, Miriam. “The Caribbean: Archaeology and Poetics.” Social Text 38 (1994): 105-110.
Scott, David. “Modernity that Predated the Modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean.” History Workshop Journal. Vol. 58. No. 1. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Smith, Mark M. “Time, Slavery and Plantation Capitalism in the Ante-Bellum American South.” Past & Present 150.1 (1996): 142-168.
Tomich, Dale. “Rethinking the Plantation: Concepts and Histories.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) (2011): 15-39.
Tomich, Dale. “The Second Slavery and World Capitalism: a Perspective for Historical Inquiry.” International Review of Social History 63.3 (2018): 477-501.
Tomich, Dale. “World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism: the Cuban Sugar Industry, 1760-1868.” Theory and society (1991): 297-319.
Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. Electric Santería: Racial and sexual assemblages of transnational religion. Columbia University Press, 2015.
Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. University of California Press, 2010.
Johnson, Paul Christopher. Automatic religion: Nearhuman agents of Brazil and France. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Johnson, Paul Christopher, ed. Spirited Things: The Work of” Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Keller, Mary. The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession. JHU Press, 2002.
McAlister, Elizabeth. Rara!: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora. University of California Press, 2002.
Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Strongman, Roberto. “Transcorporeality in Vodou.” Journal of Haitian Studies (2008): 4-29.
Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. “Songs for Ezili: Vodou Epistemologies of (trans) gender.” Feminist Studies 37.2 (2011): 417-436.