Browsing by Author "Jaji, Tsitsi E"

This project examines how African diasporic writers and filmmakers from Zimbabwe, Martinique, Britain, and the United States inscribe into their works a sense of anticipation of release from subjection, as if to experience in advance the feeling of unequivocal bodily relief. Charting its appearance in both descriptive content as well as aesthetic form—such as metaphor, narrative structure, and aspects of cinematic editing—“Fugitive Time” shows how this recurring form of utopian time-consciousness distinct to African diasporic cultural expression evolves from the 18th century slave narrative to the contemporary novel, and how it mutates across disparate global geographies. In epic poetry, autobiography, experimental film, and historical novels, the project isolates this fugitive anticipation of the outside of black subjection and the persistent memory of violence that engenders it. In these works, utopia, however elusive, lies in that moment when the body at last finds release.

This dissertation draws on Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) to track melancholy and genius in black letters, culture, and history from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment; it contends that melancholy is a catalyst for genius, and that genius is a signifier of the maternal.

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Sigmund Freud prefigures an array of discourses in black studies. One mode of interrogation occurs with relation to his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”. Some African American literature, such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy, invokes this work indirectly, just as theoretical texts, like Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, have direct engagement. Nevertheless, Freud’s attendance to mourning and melancholia is pertinent. He surmises that when the love object dies, mourning does the reparative work of suturing the ego back together after its splitting and impoverishment; melancholia, by contrast, is the “pathological disposition” which occasions such disrepair and instantiates itself through the psychic loss of the love object. In turn, melancholy carries the possibility of devolving into mania such that the one experiencing the psychic loss desires to inflict harm on, while simultaneously becoming, the love object; theorists generally assign this category to the mother. Furthermore, I assert that Freud’s diagnosis of mania reifies long-held and reductive designations when applied to blackness and maternity. My intervention stages a correlation and counterpoint to the above theorizations.

Through dissertation chapters in which an overarching thematic juxtaposes itself with each subject of inquiry, I contend that instead of melancholy catalyzing mania—a rendering of the “pathological” for the people in which the dissertation has its investments—, the affect fosters performances of excellence, given the shorthand “genius”. As a form of expression and interpretation in black thought writ large, genius emerges as a response to and in excess of one’s melancholy. This productivity concretizes that genius, not mania, is an affective vestige that is at once reducible and irreducible to the mother; and allows me to journey on a search for her, in myriad iterations, to discover a subject found as opposed to an object lost

“That’ll Teach!” contributes to a body of scholarship responding to Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” by arguing that Black women’s necessarily interdisciplinary literary practices model meaningful forms of theorizing and teaching through poetry. Through Black feminist critical close readings of Claudia Rankine’s layering of multimedia techniques, Jayne Cortez’s collaborative mobilization of funk with her band, and June Jordan’s expansion of the traditional university workshop space, I demonstrate how Black women poets have always understood their creative work as extending beyond the boundaries of the genre and its historically attendant readings. The creation, circulation, and applications of their projects complicate an over-reliance on the narrative content of Black poetry alone to activate urgency and response especially to issues of social justice. Acknowledging the increasing challenges of humanities teaching and applying the interdisciplinary modality of these poet-scholar-teachers, I ultimately offer an adaptable framework for elementary through post-secondary teachers who want to incorporate the reading and writing of poetry into their curricula to facilitate resonant student engagement in a range of content areas.

“The Space in Between: Middle Passage Movement and Black Women’s Literature” explores renderings of the Middle Passage in literature by African American and Caribbean writers. Departing from the premise that the term “Middle Passage” is insufficient where it concerns describing the massive forced migration that occurred during this trans-Atlantic catastrophe, I look to black women writers in order to build a different vocabulary to depict that which has no beginning, middle, or end; that which is not confined to a narrow strait but whose nomenclature suggests otherwise. Bringing together Caribbeanist philosophical treatises on crossing with the dynamic work in black geography studies and black feminist literary criticism, I argue that black women writers intervene in what has previously been a male dominated field of criticism on the Middle Passage and use their literature to retell Middle Passage stories anew and isolate specific forms of movement such as holding, landing, and crawling, that outlive the period of trans-Atlantic slavery.

Across four chapters, this dissertation addresses the challenges of writing about the Middle Passage for which there is no set of identifiable ruins before turning specifically to three works of literature – M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Each of the works I study either recreates or takes inspiration from a historical event that occurred during the Middle Passage or a subsequent crossing such as the 1781 Zong massacre, the 1803 Igbo Landing drowning, and the 1856 infanticide committed by Margaret Garner. Heeding to the motion necessary for this particular trans-Atlantic event ultimately allows us to reckon with what I call “Middle Passages” or “Middle Passings” – the multiple crossings that ensue in the wake of this unparalleled event. Tracing how black women move inevitably reveals where they move to and through putting pressure on the term “middle” that precedes “passage” identifying multiple mid-spaces while also calling for an expansion of critical “sites of slavery” and afterlives of slavery, more generally.

This dissertation looks at feminist and antiracist interventions in contemporary literature and culture and the ways in which poetry and the concept of poiesis can be taken up to imagine more equitable political praxis. My first chapter offers a sustained close reading of Diane di Prima’s Loba and its mythical, feminist intervention within “open field” poetry, a movement associated with the Black Mountain poets. The remainder of the dissertation extends my analysis of poetic “opening” into other contexts, advocating for newly imagined forms of care in the worlds of poetry, academic and online discourses, collective protest movements, and popular music. My project examines “poetry” not just as a particular genre or medium, but as a mode of thinking and being in the world. I turn to poetry for the tools it has the capacity to give us: the ability to read closely and carefully; the understanding that “meaning” can be layered, subjective, and even contradictory; the desire to inwardly reflect and reach outside of ourselves, simultaneously; a call to witness. Poetry offers a way of writing, but also a way of reading, interpreting, and responding. In this spirit, I include “Interludes” that offer pauses, spaces for reflection, and bridges between the major contexts and concepts of different chapters; these Interludes, as well as my Introduction and Conclusion, each contain an original poem and encourage the interrelationship between scholarly and creative modes of writing.