Another excellent book published by Duke University Press that has been indexed recently by Southwest Humanities, Leda Maria Martins’s book Performances of Spiral Time (translated by Bruna Barros and Jess Oliveira) is now available. Published on September 30, 2025, in Performances of Spiral Time, Afro-Brazilian philosopher Leda Maria Martins proposes a different model of temporality—what she calls “spiral time”—drawing on African and African diasporic thought, embodied performance, oral tradition, ritual, sacredness, and memory. Instead of viewing time as linear (with past → present → future in a straight line), spiral time loops back on itself, recurs, bends, and allows memory and ancestors to remain present. The book argues that for Afro-Brazilian practices—capoeira, Candomblé, theater—and daily embodied actions, this curved, recurrent time is not just symbolic but materially lived. The body, through its movements and rituals, becomes a site where knowledge (historical, spiritual, communal) is inscribed and carried forward. Martins uses poetic, philosophical, and performance-oriented lenses to describe how spiral time resists Eurocentric notions of progress and time, offering instead a relational, ancestral, embodied ontology. Essential reading for scholars of Brazilian studies, Latin American studies, African Diaspora studies, and religious studies. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 