Sipping Freedom: Engaging Black Radical Imagination, Confronting Middle Passage Memory, Embodying The Sacred

Abstract

How can inherited colonial notions of the "human" be transformed by the assertion of African1 histories of the present? My research is driven by an impulse to recover and engage an inheritance of intellectual, cultural and spiritual epistemologies of the African diaspora and with it shape futurist narratives of possibility. This major research portfolio consists of an academic paper and a solo performance art installation in two acts. In this portfolio, I propose that colonial notions of "the human" can be transformed by demonstrating their limitations and by enacting and performing alternatives in the present. The methodologies in this research depend on engaging Black radical imagination, confronting Middle Passage memory, and embodying the Sacred. I explore this embodiment through hybrid cultural and spiritual practices which I identify as tools for becoming. I propose these methodologies as autopoietic praxes of freedom.