Am I Making Sense?: Autoethnographic Essays on Race, Language and Systemic Power

Abstract

My project is composed of a series of interrelated creative and critical essays. The creative portion, which comprises the bulk of the project, takes the form of a series of creative nonfiction essays guided by an autoethnographic methodology. These essays use my body and my experience as lenses through which to examine the culture(s) I exist in, such that the theory, history, and literary contacts I employ are grounded in lived experience. Specifically, I am working to contextualise personal and family experience growing up (and being educated) Black and mixed-race in the States, as well as the experience of my move to Ireland (and its related but distinct socio-cultural context). Though each essay grapples with different specifics, the project converges thematically around explorations of language and knowledge (and knowledge-making/knowledge-standardising institutions) and their relationship to power, linking these to Blackness, gender, myth, and nation in a transatlantic context. My critical essays - one on Blackface and racial caricature in performances of Othello in early modern and contemporary theatre, and the other on Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes as a radical subversion of the traditional authority of notational forms of writing - serve to complement and underpin the creative work.