Date of Thesis

Spring 2026

Description

“Imagined Afterlives: Anti-Black Medical Violences in Contemporary Black Arts” is a multi-genre exploration that studies the following works: Venus (1996) by Suzan Lori Parks, Get Out (2017) by Jordan Peele, and Dawn (1987) by Octavia Butler. I respectively study an experimental play, a psychological horror film, and a speculative novel to understand how Black creatives are depicting and responding to anti-Black violences, particularly medical violences. This work brings together Black art spanning from the late 1980s to 2017 as well as historical events and figures from the eighteenth century all the way to a not-so-distant future. While these works defamiliarize manifestations of chattel enslavement and historical anti-Blackness, they ultimately show us that the afterlives of these structures and dynamics persist in the present.

This thesis takes up two central arguments: 1. Chattel enslavement, and its contemporary forms, are extensions of the State’s control over Black life and death. Using the framework of Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics,” I think about how Black bodies are surveilled, fetishized, publicly spectacularized, and brutalized both in life and post-mortem. 2. Black creatives, in their responses to violence against Black bodies, are both resisting and reproducing elements of anti-Blackness. They are both creating work that has the capacity for transgressive dialogue while also respectacularizing Black suffering and upholding harmful anti-Black tropes.

Inspired by the real-life of Saartjie Baartman, Chapter 1, “Sideshow Spectacles & Post-Mortem Performances in Suzan Lori Parks’ Venus,” examines the ways the entertainment sideshow venue and the medical space operate as sites of anti-Black spectacularization for protagonist, Venus. In the sideshow venue, Venus’ butt becomes a metonym for wildness and Africanness, also becoming a site of caricaturized humor and absurdity. However, in the medical space, she is totalized in a different way, no longer a metonym but reduced to individual anatomical parts. Through her literal and ontological dissection, Venus is atomized.

Chapter 2, “Getting In: Embodied Blackness as White Supremacy in Jordan Peele’s Get Out,” analyzes Black protagonist, Chris, who undergoes the Armitages’ Coagula procedure, inserting the brain of a white person into the body of a Black person. This chapter argues that the Coagula procedure becomes a form of white supremacy that requires embodying and invasively (as well as surgically) getting inside of Blackness in order to destroy it. Moreover, the Coagula procedure relies on not just white intellectual superiority but physical limitation that depends on the Black body for the white body to reach its full potential. In this way, white inferiority is as much a part of white supremacy, serving as its extension rather than its opposite.

Finally, Chapter 3, “Alien Futures & Enslaved Sexual Violences in Octavia Butler’s Dawn” explores Black female protagonist Lilith waking up on an alien planet run by the Oankali species sometime in the future, except they reanimate chattel enslavement dynamics “of the past.” This chapter argues that Lilith is part of a broader lineage of historical Black women who were medically and sexually exploited. Through investigating Lilith’s relationship with her “ooloi” pairing Nikanj, this chapter also elucidates the enslaver-enslaved dynamics between them that both recasts violence as intimacy and kinship while drawing connections between medical language used by doctors and the rhetoric around sexual assault.

I ultimately pursue this project to depict these stories and the Black creatives that have produced them as fuller, more complicated people who are trying to imagine new endings all while risking misrepresentation. This is about the necessity of building on the archive of enslaved histories and afterlives, all while recognizing that they will forever remain unfinished.

 

Keywords

anti-Blackness, medical violence, Black arts, chattel enslavement, bodies/embodiment, multi-genre

Access Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Type

Bachelor of Arts

Major

English- Literary Studies

Minor, Emphasis, or Concentration

Creative Writing

First Advisor

Jeremy Chow

Second Advisor

Jennifer Thomson

Third Advisor

Ankita Kumar

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