Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Jonathan Gray

Committee Members

Amber Musser

Sonali Perera

Subject Categories

Africana Studies | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America | Rhetoric and Composition

Keywords

archives, black feminism, Caribbean studies, decolonial, diaspora, counterhistories

Abstract

This dissertation constructs a discursive genealogy of Black women’s storytelling, positioning its art and aesthetics as a form of colonial archival undoing. Each chapter explores how transmission and documentation can transform—and circumvent—traditional colonial archives. Beginning at the start of the twentieth-century to present, this project traces the discursive legacies of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Staceyann Chin, examining each writer as a site of becoming as they individually (and collectively) seek to articulate an expansive idea of a Black world that constitutes a broader understanding of Black freedom. They each share a common goal of creating a self identification that transgresses the racist, classist, homophobic society they navigate. A Caribbean sensibility serves as an interlocutor for their resistance to Westernized cultural standards of being. I uncover how their discursive resistance serves as a critical inquiry into the past, present, and future of Black liberated futures. Thus, I argue that we must treat archives not simply as static repositories, but as a resurrection of Black life that creates new possibilities of being.

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