The Black Palimpsest: Rewriting the Body & Space through Ancestral Memory and Movement

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Black body, conscripted into what Rizvana Bradley theorizes as a modality of “Black Aesthesis,” occupies a paradoxical position between being and non-being—a tension that underscores the enduring necessity of reckoning with its colonial emplacement and the reverberations of transgenerational inheritance (Bradly 2023). This thesis contends that the Black body functions both as a repository of archival residues and as a generative locus of transformational praxis, requiring the mobilization of collective epistemologies articulated through Black Consciousness, the recuperation of ancestral memory, and a radical reconfiguration of the researcher’s own positionality. In this regard, I argue that the work of retracing archives extends beyond the body alone to encompass the spirit, geographic sites, and institutional power structures. To conceptualize how these layered histories remain inscribed across bodies and landscapes, I turn to the metaphor of the palimpsest. A palimpsest is a surface that carries multiple layers of writing in which earlier inscriptions remain partially visible beneath newer ones. Drawing on this concept, I introduce a methodology I call Black Palimpsest, which names the layered endurance of colonial violence across corporeal, psychological, spatial, and systemic registers, while traces of resistance, ancestral recovery, and reimagination remain embedded beneath the surface—linking the temporal slippage of past, rupture, and present. This study traces that layered movement across Kansas City, Stagville State Historic Site, and Benin: Kansas City reflecting the contemporary afterlives of racialized spatial policy, Stagville anchoring the historical terrain of enslavement, and Benin situating the inquiry within deeper genealogies of African cultural continuity. Drawing on theories of Black Modernity, Black Consciousness, Black Geography, and Black Performativity, I animate and critically interrogate Black Palimpsest through a site-exchange performance at Stagville, positioning the work as a relay between theory and practice and as a relational framework through which ancestral memory is mobilized.Figures 1: Fisherman’s hut in Ganvié, located in Benin The image (Figure 1) above depicts a fisherman’s hut in the community of Ganvié, located on Lake Nokoué in Benin. I include this image because it reflects the conceptual architecture through which I organize the thesis—an approach that structures my theoretical framework, production aesthetics, and methodological design. The stilts supporting the hut represent the epistemological pillars on which the research stands, while the hut itself symbolizes the central argument being constructed. Each chapter corresponds to a component of this structure. In Chapter 1: Introduction and Positionality, I introduce the pillars that ground who I am—the communities I come from, those I represent, and my position within broader scholarly and artistic discourse. The hut, as the nucleus, represents my ongoing process of interrogating identity, Blackness, artistic practice, and epistemological grounding. In Chapter 2: Theoretical Frameworks, I assemble the structural pillars that support the house, drawing from African epistemologies, dance scholarship, Black Modernity, Black Geography, Black performance and performativity, somatics, spatial theory, and ancestral knowledge passed down through my grandmother. These pillars stabilize the argument by placing the body and land into conversation as living archives capable of revealing suppressed histories and latent connections. In Chapter 3: Action Plan, the hut becomes inhabited. If the stilts represent the supporting knowledge systems, Chapter 3 examines how those supports translate into practice—how audiences enter the structure and move through the narrative environment of the performance. Here I outline the entry points through which viewers engage the production, demonstrating how the theoretical pillars elevate and sustain the experiential world of the work. Chapter 4: Methodology then examines the architecture itself, explaining the conceptual framework of Black Palimpsest and detailing both the hut’s structure and the pillars that support it. Finally, Chapter 5: Implications and Future Possibilities considers how this structure might be extended beyond the thesis, exploring how the framework could be transferred to other sites, disciplines, and creative practices.