The Soil of Our Grandmothers' Gardens: Womanist Visual Culture Excavated From Memories and Depictions of Plantations in Antebellum America

Abstract

This dissertation is about Black women’s experiences and memory excavation; centering the lives and land of Black women descendants of formerly enslaved Africans, and portraits of Black women’s lives as depicted in plantation themed cinema. I position my research in relation to and in conversation with Womanists, social scientists, and American Studies scholars who have utilized their scholarship to subvert power structures that demand particularized form and function. By staking my theoretical claims in Womanism, I am demarcating the kind of American Studies scholar that I am: one who studies within communities of Womanist scholarship, and in conversation with Black people who corporately wrestle with the construct of America from the vantage point of embodied, thinking Black people of faith, who live for, and love Black people and Black culture. The nontraditional form of this dissertation specifically, and the fungibility of my research identity in general, are intentioned expressions of my scholarly voice and orientation to the field. As part of this dissertation research, I conduct community engaged research through a film festival. I exhume effects of memory and storytelling through oral histories. I unearth artifacts of soil and sacramental re-memory through ritual soil collections. These three seemingly disconnected modes of research are tethered together to answer the question, “How do vestiges of plantation narratives inform Black women’s resilience in light of anti-Blackness embedded in modern institutions?” To answer this question, I examine soil as source of affect, develop and host a film festival as a means of localizing and illumining modern experiences with a transhistorical materiality- namely the plantation, and conduct oral histories as a means of cultivating an epistemic archive. At times I am interpreting soil as place, utilizing its excavation as method, and at other times deploying it as metaphor; always tilling the soil as a potentiality for fertile memory excavation.