Did it Work? Re-enacting the maternal body as a site for ancestral memories: photography and oral history as vehicles for reconstructing history in the re-embodiment of Black Matrilineage

This thesis seeks a contextual framework that helps me understand the way in which I utilise my mother's body and my own as a site for evoking ancestral memories. Through collaborative conversational practice, I use photography and the oral to identify Black literary matrilineage as the framework through which I interact with my mother. Using photography through a visceral enactment to understand her embodied oral and physical language, I was able to locate a literary framework named Black literary matrilineage. Through this, I clarified the components that enable me to utilise its methodology as the act I am in with my mother.

In re-structuring this hybrid methodology through photography, I acknowledge the tradition of Black literary matrilineage by navigating a re-interaction with my maternal ancestors, starting with my mother. In acts of translation and participation, I gain access to my mother’s embodied language. This language intertwines with my ancestral narratives in a code I learn to decipher through a process of search, discovery, and recovery. This embodied approach is personal and reflective, respecting the nature of my family’s history and my mother’s body as the archive of this history. By defining the components of Black matrilineage, I engage in a process that asserts photography and the oral tradition as repositories of history that can be engaged within this form. I then use these forms as sites of reclamation and resistance, positioning photography’s use in the act of Black Matrilineage to affirm a reconnection with the literary tradition by removing the literary form. This research adds to the discourse of Black Matrilineage and is my contribution to knowledge, demonstrating photography as a way in which familial histories can be recovered.

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