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theses

There is a rich body of scholarship on Black women’s fiction and poetry that analyzes its engagements with aesthetic forms as well as the themes of memory and history. Likewise, Black women’s memoir and autobiography have been read for their illustrations of Black feminist politics, historical narratives, and intellectual histories. However, less attention has been paid to the specific role of embodiment in the liminal genres of Black queer hybrid memoir texts, including semi-autobiographical fiction and poetry, book-length memoir essay texts, and forms like Audre Lorde’s biomythography. My dissertation Afrekete’s Room: Mapping the Shape of Space and Narrative in Black Queer Women’s Writing intervenes in this conversation to argue that within these texts, Black queer women and trans people mediate and narrate embodied experiences in order to position Black queer bodies as potential sites of knowledge production about gender, blackness, erotics, and subjectivity.

My project develops the analytic of sensual worldmaking, a term derived in part from Amber Musser’s deployment of ‘sensation’ and M. NourbeSe Philip’s concept of s/place. Musser uses sensation as a frame for drawing attention to the physical and affective impressions of embodied experience as well as the differential operations of power on different subjects, while s/place names the mutual imbrication of external land-based geographies and fleshy, internal, corporeal landscapes in which Black women’s bodies in the Americas are positioned. I draw these and other black feminist frameworks together to name sensual worldmaking as a set of strategies in which Black queer women and trans people’s self-representative writing uses embodied intimacies, memories, and other sensuous experiences to generate critical knowledge.

Chapter one theorizes sensual worldmaking through tracing a Black feminist geography of Audre Lorde’s embodied experiences in Zami: a New Spelling of My Name (1982). I illustrate how queer corporeal landscapes and Caribbean diasporic social spaces are entwined in Lorde’s narration of moments of erotic intimacy and desire with herself, her mother, and Afrekete. Chapter two argues that Jamaican author Michelle Cliff’s strategic manipulation of self-referential narratives in her memoir Claiming an Identity They Taught me to Despise (1980) facilitated her Black, lesbian, and feminist critiques of colonialism and imperialism. This chapter confronts Cliff’s uneasiness with her work’s characterization, by some of her contemporaries, as autobiographical and therefore depoliticized by re-centering the political significance of her narrative and discursive strategies.

In chapter three, I examine Dionne Brand’s narrative reflections on Operation Urgent Fury, the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada during the Grenada Revolution, across literary forms, especially the memoir A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) and the novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). I argue that Brand’s use of multiple temporal orientations and grammatical persons to narrate embodied memories with varying degrees of coherence and fragmentation allows her to situate her Black lesbian body and its sensations of pain, disorientation, and shock as in a kind of continuous relationship with a larger Black diasporic community. Finally, in chapter four I discuss Nigerian-American author Akwaeke Emezi as a contemporary literary figure who uses autobiographical fiction and digital media sites such as Instagram and Twitter as technologies of queer self-representation. This chapter argues that Emezi’s 2018 autobiographical novel Freshwater proposes gendered embodiment as problematic for its protagonist Ada, and that human embodiment is itself not necessarily reconcilable for subjects within Igbo cosmology. As a work of Black queer diaspora studies, Afrekete’s Room contributes a crucial focus on embodied knowledge production within Black queer feminist literary and cultural studies.

ETD_11686

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

ETD doctoral

doi:10.7282/t3-h073-xj67

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