Speaking Fire Out of Burn: Womanist Cartographies and the Healing Sojourns
Topics: Black Geographies
, Feminist Geographies
, American South
Keywords: Womanist Cartography, AfroCarolina, Black South Women, Womanist Navigations, Healing Sojourns, Spirit-Centered Ethnography, Folklore
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 39
Authors:
Michelle Lanier, UNC-Chapel Hill & Duke University
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
In “Rooted: Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies,” I describe the 'transformative balm' potential of contending with the southern landscapes that hold and held the feet of Black women and femmes.
The piece ends with a litany of questions meant to serve as wayfinders for future inquiries. Journeying and sojourning, seeking and ground-truthing, are the choreographies of this proposed deepening.
The destination(s) are to the multitudinous self and her source lands, her source waterways. This is a terraqueous work, slick and muddy, shifting and thick.
Quite literally, with the tools of Womanist Cartography (mapping the lives/dreams/feet of Black women) and ethnopoetics (conjuring the rhythm/quietude/power of spoken text) I seek to revisit ancestral spaces and remap them with words.
I will revisit the birthplaces of my great great grandmothers and their daughters (all in AfroCarolina) and seek to redefine these unceded territories with the boundlessness of the souls the soils held.
The ultimate aim is an illumination of the nuanced ecosystems of witness surrounding Black women’s Southern homelands.
The title of this abstract ('Speaking Fire Out of Burn') comes from a Black/Indigenous tradition of healing, passed across generations and often across genders.
Communal fire talkers were/are able to breathe healing, often resulting in the miraculous erasure of pain and scarring. Revisiting spaces of “hot” ancestral memory, with the cooling breath of autonomy and self-declared beauty, is also fire talking work. This is also the way of Womanist Cartography, to heal, to poetically adorn the South with our mothers’ names.
Speaking Fire Out of Burn: Womanist Cartographies and the Healing Sojourns
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides