health humanities – Invisible Mirrors

February 27, 2023May 15, 2024

Lecture at the Royal Academy Schools

I will be giving a lecture about my work at the Royal Academy Schools in London on Monday March 6th at 11.30. If you would like to attend please email me (j.cussans@gmail.com) and I’ll put you on the guest list. The lecture will be in three sections:

1. Ritual Practice : Veve Kunigundis

Focussing on the ritual drawings I make with Roberto N. Peyre, specifically Veve Kunigundis made during documenta15.

2. Drawing Analogies : Invisible Machines

Focussing on a chapter about ‘Psychoanalytic Imaginaries and Paranoid Critical Theory’ from the book on diagrams I’m writing with David Burrows, Dean Kenning and Mary Yacoob

3. Critical Arts : Health Humanities

Reframing critical and socially engaged arts practices from a mental health and wellbeing perspective

“Finally an authoritative book on that weird, complex figure of the zombie that delves deep into the dark heart of the matter rather than skating the surface. John Cussans is that rare writer who can bring to bear anthropology, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial history, philosophy, politics, folk-lore and a love of pulp fiction and film to offer a compelling story about how a marginal superstition from the Caribbean became the defining monster of our times. Prepare for a wild ride that moves elegantly from Hegel and Haiti, via Mesmerism, James Bond, Georges Bataille and Surrealism to Papa Doc Duvalier and Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors, always steadily illuminating a path through a forest of delirious details. A truly marvellous journey.”

Roger Luckhurst, author of Zombies: A Cultural History

“Cussans rejects exceptionalist explanations of Vodou and the zombie to present a nuanced description of those phenomena within the international political, economic and cultural environment in which both the realities and the inventions are situated. This comprehensive work is a must read for anyone wishing to understand more about the destinies of African-based religions in the Americas, and especially concerning the uses and abuses of Haitian cultural phenomena by outside interests.”

LeGrace Benson, author of Arts and Religions of Haiti: How the Sun Illuminates Under Cover of Darkness and President of The Haitian Studies Association.

“No one alive, or – almost certainly – deceased, has thought about zombies more voraciously than John Cussans. While the outcome of this feasting is not pretty, what it has unearthed cannot be laid to rest again. Those who doubt the consistency, deep historical momentum, or global significance of the ‘zombie-complex’ will find all such reservations fundamentally challenged by this troubling book. Subsequent to this meticulous and wide-ranging process of exhumation, it is no longer plausible to deny that an inexterminable anticipation of undead uprising continues to define the horizon of our world.”

Nick Land, author of Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism.