“Look a Negro!”: self-authorship, self-definition, and the wake of anti-blackness

Abstract

In this manuscript, I lift Black feminisms as a methodological intervention on a holistic meaning-making theory and its relationship to anti-Blackness. Specifically, I employed a Black feminist literary criticism, which presumes that Black people have cultivated living and survival practices throughout their history in the United States. I analyzed 7 full-length books and essays written by James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Additionally, in attending to Black feminist theorizing, I used creative prose to situate myself in the text by locating the curated findings from the literary analysis in my mother’s rearing practices. Pointing to the historical ways Black people have lived in the wake of anti-Black structures, I depart from the meaning-making pathways articulated by self-authorship and point to the possibilities of self-defining praxis for Black people.

Keywords:

• Self authorship
• self-definition
• anti-blackness
• black feminism
• literary criticism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wilson Kwamogi Okello

Wilson Kwamogi Okello, PhD, is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on theories of Blackness and Black feminist theories to think about knowledge production and student/early adult development. Most immediately, he is concerned with how Blackness makes visible the epistemic foundations that structure what it means to be human and imagining otherwise possibilities for Black being therein. He also considers how theories of Blackness and Black feminist theories might reconfigure understandings of racialized stress and trauma, qualitative inquiry, critical masculinities, and curriculum and pedagogy. His work is published in venues such as the Journal of College Student Development; Race, Ethnicity and Education; and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Education Policy Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.