Across the globe, practitioners of African Diaspora Religions (ADR) are traversing and crisscrossing uncharted religious and spiritual terrains. At the forefront of emergent and "otherwise" worlds, ADR practitioners are harnessing the power of AI to connect, sustain relationships, fulfill required rituals, and innovate new ones. Simultaneously captivated by the possibilities of AI for religious and spiritual encounters, they are reimagining spiritual care in transformative ways. By agitating and engaging tensions among multiple understandings of AI—Artificial Intelligence, Ancestral Intelligence, Augmented Intelligence, and Abundant Imagination—papers in this session explore, examine, redefine, and critically interrogate the past, present and future applications of AI in ADR religious practice and spiritual life.
This paper examines the life, death, and evolving cultural afterlife of “Aunt” Julia Brown, a Louisiana midwife, healer, and formerly enslaved woman whose memory has become central to one of the region’s most enduring Voodoo legends. Drawing on archival records, oral histories, and local folklore, the study reconstructs Brown’s historical presence in the St. John the Baptist Parish community while tracing how her death in 1915 became linked to narratives of supernatural power and a devastating hurricane. The paper explores the transformation of Brown from a community caregiver into a touristic symbol of “Voodoo” haunting, revealing how racialized and gendered mythmaking shapes public memory of Black religious women. By analyzing her legend’s circulation in ghost tours, online storytelling, and paranormal media, this research highlights the tension between historical recovery and commercialized folklore, and considers how Brown’s story illuminates broader patterns in African American religious history, memory, and cultural commodification.
This paper explores how African diasporic futurist artists, such as Geraldo Oliveira and Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba, are using AI and generative technologies to transform colonial archives. In their work, bodies are isolated from ethnographic photographs, algorithmically recombined, and embedded within cosmic, speculative landscapes. These technological interventions disrupt linear, documentary notions of time, making the archive a living field where past, present, and future co-constitute one another. Moreover, by centering African ritual temporalities—rooted in event-driven, cyclical, and relational understandings of time—their art mirrors the recursive logic of algorithmic systems. In doing so, their work critiques colonial frameworks that imposed linear, hierarchical temporalities and reveals how African conceptions of time provide a vital lens for reconfiguring archives and digital systems, fostering a more expansive, interconnected, and relational experience of temporality.