Wisdom versus Instinct in African and Afro-diasporic Traditions: ‘Ruminations’ on Elizabeth Perez’s The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract

In the book, The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract (2022), Elizabeth Perez engages in this “magic” by proceeding on a discourse on the significance of the “gut” in various Afro-diasporic contexts. She asserts that the gut is as much a site of meaning as the head and blames Western epistemology as being responsible for downplaying the indispensability of the gut in this role. She adopts ethnology and history as well as affect theory in her comparison of the significance of the gut within Black Atlantic traditions.

Here, graduate student Temitope Fatunsin, lends her voice to the mix by way of a book review essay that grapples with “ways of knowing” in African and Afro-Diasporic communities. Responding to Elizabeth Perez’s The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract, Fatusin engages with specific conceptions of “wisdom” and “instinct” as embodied phenomena and argues that increased scholarly attention should be paid to the interdependence of the head and gut in religious studies