Date of Submission

Fall 2019

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Africana Studies; Human Rights

Project Advisor 1

Thomas Keenan

Abstract/Artist's Statement

The Alchemy of (G)race is a map and critical memoir examining the feeling and lived experiences of chronic musculoskeletal pain and being a survivor of sexual assault. The process of writing and conducting the research, and developing an archive for this work has been both an enlightening and painful experience itself. This query was conceived as a hybrid collection of poems and perosnal essays to translate how emotional and traumatic experiences manifest in the body and inform states of consciousness, as well as an identity at the intersections of race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and citizenship in the United States. My inquiry privileges the symbiotic experiences, and challenges my mother and I both share in coming to terms with the reality of our circumstance as educated black females living with unseen implications of invisible disabilities–whether physical, sensory, cognitive, or psychological– in our society. Through relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers, who privilege the spiritual, energetic, bodily, and otherworldly experiences of black women across the African diaspora, I hope this will also allow readers to imagine new possibilities for memoirs, and personal essays as a portal for understanding and deepening queer black feminist disability theory in Africana Studies and Human Rights.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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