Date of Award
Spring 2020
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Art
First Advisor
Sam Amadon
Abstract
Following an unnamed black collectivity consulting the oracles of mama-n-em as they build a new world, the poems in MOTHERWORLD seek to represent a world-to-come as all ready accessible within the now, even if only in glimmers. In doing so, the project asks: What emergent ways of being can be glimpsed from where I am? What does getting free look like? What does it feel like? If this world becomes manifest through modes of ritualized violence that are institutionalized through colonial structures, how do we undo this? My work is thinking through the possibility that part of this undoing lies in Saidiya Hartman’s prompt that “care is the antidote to violence.” They consider the possibility that rituals, alongside other strategies and tactics of liberation, can shift this world so that it is no longer the violent structure into which we are initiated. Further, they hold the possibility that, in revealing the mutability of this current world, rituals of communal care can make wreckage a ritualized space through which to manifest ways of being and being with each other that are beyond this current one.
Rights
© 2020, Destiny Hemphill
Recommended Citation
Hemphill, D.(2020). Motherworld. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/5665