Emancipatory Acts

Abstract

Emancipatory Acts is a performance piece that explores the experiences of racialized mothering, social memory and collective agency from my situatedness as a Black woman and mother in the United States. Emancipatory Acts suggests that the historic trauma inflicted upon Africa signifies the rapability and violability of her daughters whose reproductive labors were impressed into the service of Empire. Emancipatory Acts challenges the selectivity of social memory, the mythologizing of iconic figures and the literature of deviance that incarcerates Black female reproduction. It argues that, ultimately, Black women self-emancipate through remembering, reconstituting and redefining their existences through motherline stories that trace back to elder-women, through the ancestral world to the metaphysical Mother. Through movement, poetry, narrative, rhythm, and visual texts, this piece explores the material, socio-political, cultural and spiritual domains of Black woman-motherhood in the United States and seeks to resurrect traditions of hope, survival and self-actualized living.