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Valentina Napolitano

Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology, a Connaught Scholar and a former Director of the Latin American Studies program at the University of Toronto. She works on Critical Catholic Studies as well as on anthropology of affects, borderlands and migration and has a particular interest in psychoanalysis, affective histories, anthropology of traces and the work of Michel de Certeau. She is the author of two ethnographic monographs: "Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church" (FUP, 2016, Finalist Geertz Prize of the Society for Anthropology of Religion) and "Migration, Mujercitas and Medicine Men: Living in Urban Mexico" (UCP, 2002). She is also the co-editor (with K. Norget and M. Mayblin) of "The Anthropology of Catholicism: a Reader" (UCP, 2017), and she has authored articles and special issues also in JRAI, Material Religion, Social Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Religion and Society. Together with Simon Coleman she is the recipient of a 2018-2020 Connaught Global Challenge Award for a project on "Entangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctities and Soil" and is currently working on a new ethnographic project at the Detroit/Windsor corridor on the Catholic Church as a living infrastructure.

Essays

A Foucault’s Otherwise: A commentary on Niklaus Largier’s Figures of Possibility

This intervention invites readers to consider Largier’s interdisciplinary approach on figuration and theistic immanence, particularly in the light of Foucault’s reflection on Subject and Power and his large influence on Anthropological and Social Sciences studies of power and the willful subject. Napolitano examines mystics and negative theology’s thread of “the ground” in Largier’s work, likening its affective intensity and dynamic of figuration to an otherwise imagination of the political, and its forms of violence.

Immanent Singularity

This intervention invites to think active dis-imagination, in mystical and contemporary traditions, as a grounding political force.

Interdisciplinary Entanglements

Queries on enfleshment, the nature of materiality and the corporeal intertwining with histories of coloniality and race relations cannot be separated from an understanding of political theology and its mobilization.

The Powers of Powerlessness

Our modest proposal is for those of us who work in political theology to listen to the Americas and to do so, insofar as possible, ethnographically.