Black Women’s Creative Praxes: Meditating on Interior Journeys of Becoming

Abstract

My dissertation turns spatial inquiry inward to explore the question: How do Black women use creative praxes as tools to more fully express the interior dimensions operating within self-actualization and collective liberation processes? Drawing on Black Geographies, Black Feminist Thought, and Black Studies frameworks, I conduct an autoethnographic, content analysis of 7 creative texts by Black women (i.e., memoir, essay, novel, personal development book, speech, photography catalog), as well as my own creative works (i.e., poetry, photography, painting) to understand how our internal landscapes and geographic visions are made knowable through creative praxes. My project is also deeply experimental in its weaving of personal narrative, creative theorization, and in-depth accounting of my efforts to conduct emancipatory social science scholarship. In particular, creative expression is examined as a form of geographic expression wielded by Black women to assert their embodied vision (i.e., ways of knowing and moving through the world) amidst living within and beyond racist, patriarchal, capitalist landscapes in the United States. Centering Black women’s experiential wisdom grounded in their inner knowing, I uncover how engaging with Black women on their own terms unveils journeys of becoming as socio-spatial responses to encounters with colonial systems of domination. Importantly, examining Black women’s lived experiences, with a focus on Black interiorities, illuminates an ethic of Black well-being that caters to the whole of Black beingness. Specifically, exploring Black women’s spatial imaginaries unveils the markedly metaphysical dimensions of Black women’s well-being and placemaking practices that defy Eurocentric, neoliberal thought and modes of being human. For instance, Black women’s ability to self-actualize into truer versions of themselves often involves undergoing a process of deconditioning from hegemony, so that they can embody alternative conceptualizations of self-definition, worth, and value that are based in Black abundance, enoughness, and a politics of refusal. Additionally, Black women regularly prioritize the creation of spaces where they can fully tune into their mind, body, spirit, psyche, and consciousness, over economic stability and profitability. Finally, I explore how Black feminists and womanists evoke relational place-making when they advocate for all people to undergo processes of becoming more aligned with their innate values so that they can take seriously their roles as shapers of a more liberatory future. Thus, my research makes the case for employing analytical frameworks epistemologically grounded in an interior vantage point of embodied vision to arrive at more nuanced pictures of the totality of the Black communities’ geographic experiences.