The Beautiful Synonym is Violent Re: creating Black Identity Through a Poetics of Re-remembering

Abstract

This thesis explores the recent works of American artist Kara Walker in conversation with two Canadian poetry collections: Dionne Brand’s Inventory (2006) and Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis (2017). This thesis considers how we might understand the contemporary experience of Blackness in North America through a poetics of extraction, refinement, and rememoration. By turning to theories of the Black diaspora and the idea of the split-mind and/or split-experience of the diaspora created by the triangulated transatlantic slave trade and the succeeding generations, this thesis uses terms of a poetics of extraction, refinement, and rememoration. These terms are developed in the introductory section and are employed to discuss the continuing affects and effects of intergenerational trauma. This thesis seeks to address and consider, how it may be possible to preserve and understand the violence of our intersecting histories without perpetuating them?