Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary

The coupling of water politics with water spirituality will be sharpened in Chapter 4 by recounting continuing efforts of Ojibwe “Water Walking” Women to recover older indigenous practice in attending to the water “herself” as living Spirit, before moving into a consideration of the spiritual force of White “Biopolitics” and Christian “Domination” under the rubric of Pauline notions of “Principalities and Powers” and Potawatomi ideas of the “Windigo” phenomenon. Robin Kimmerer’s invocation of Nanabozho and unpacking of the Seven Fires Prophecy will open the discussion toward a more indigenous comprehension of Great Lakes dwelling and struggle.

Chapter 2 centers the book’s overall concern for water politics in contemporary Detroit, offering a brief resume of the neocolonial history of the Strait, including the last sixty years of white flight, but focused especially on a new modality of white supremacy understood in terms of Michel Foucault’s “Biopolitics,” culminating in the state-imposed regime of emergency management since 2013—embodying finance capital evisceration of city assets and democratic process in the name of an austerity politics and a racialized renovation of public water provision. Countering this neo-liberal experiment in privatization, large-scale foreclosure, and takeover of water-infrastructure—recently re-deployed from the Global South in stressed Northern cities like Detroit and Flint—is the ferocious creativity of African American-led grassroots coalitions seeking a different “world possibility” that gives the book its particular leitmotif.

In this essay, I offer a thought experiment by figuring Tupac Shakur as an icon of interrogation of the post-industrial condition from within the idiom of diasporic possession cult vision, ‘reading’ his polyvalence as manifestation of the African Ogou, Orisha of iron and anger, politics and its discontents, auguring urban desperation for underground meaning. The effort is one of challenge to Western pretension to tame trauma as tautology, by tattooing the drive to bifurcate morality into good and evil with an older and more indigenous sounding of oppression, privileging paradoxical complexity as a wiser ‘sign’ of human maturity and spiritual vitality.

Abstract A nutritional deficiency of zinc in man which occurs in the Middle East produces severe growth retardation, hypogonadism, roughened skin, general lethargy, and an oral glucose tolerance te...