Item Details

title

SICK & TIRED OF THESE BROKEN PROMITHES PROMITHES: NAVIGATING THE SEDUCTIVE FALSEHOOD OF BLACK REPRESENTATION AND THE IN(TER)VENTION OF BLACK GUERILLA EXPRESSIONISM

author

Hussein, Nadia A

abstract

Representation Matters is an utterance that is often evoked to uncover the ways globalized anti-blackness constructs forms of exclusion within media and culture. The phrase acts as a kind of perceptible measure for the assumed racial progress of civil society, as the presence of black bodies in powerful positions attempts to serve as verification that the horrors of slavery and genocide are simply the unfortunate effects of past mistakes rather than an enduring legacy of gratuitous violence. My thesis plans on analyzing how the visibility of racialized and gendered bodies, especially those made visible for entertainment, are intertwined within the ontometaphysically violent process of obliterating the Other, particularly the black nonbeing. My analysis hopes to unveil representation as a fraudulent measure for progress and examine representation as an epistemological tool that employs rhetorical arguments designed to fortify the anti-black logic that maintains civil society.My thesis will focus on how black representation within American popular culture is implicated within the politics of the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner workings of a place, institution, or group of people within an event. In addition, I reflect on critical fabulation as an in(ter)vention of the archive and representation. The practice of reimagining the black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My thesis will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of black life in events of social death.

subject

Afropessimism

Black Feminism

Critical Fabulation

Quare Studies

Rhetoric

Womanism

contributor

Von Burg, Ron (committee chair)

Kirby-Straker, Rowena (committee member)

Warren, Calvin (committee member)

date

2020-05-29T08:36:05Z (accessioned)

2020-05-29T08:36:05Z (available)

2020 (issued)

degree

Communication (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/96837 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis