🔶 Project Overview​
This interdisciplinary portfolio explores Black American identity as an active, imaginative, and relational process through three interconnected works: a critical reflection on African Studies, a theoretical essay, and an original Afrofuturist script. Together, they examine how lived experience, academic theory, and speculative storytelling can work together to reframe diasporic identity as a form of cultural authorship.
🔶 Reflection – Approaches to African Studies​​
This reflective essay emerged from a graduate module and chronicles my evolving relationship to African Studies as a diasporic researcher. It critically engages topics such as internal colonialism, Pan-Africanism, museum critique, and the politics of knowledge. The reflection centers the diasporic voice not as an outsider but as a site of meaningful inquiry, positioning lived experience as a valid lens for academic engagement.
​
Focus: Navigating African Studies as a Black American
Themes: Diasporic tension, ethical research, intellectual humility, museum critique
Skills: Seminar co-leadership, academic reflection, ethical analysis, thematic synthesis
🔶 Theoretical Essay – We Already Are​
This essay introduces the framework of cultural authorship to conceptualize Black American identity beyond trauma or nostalgia. Drawing on scholars such as Hall, Wynter, Glissant, and Womack, it argues for a generative, creolized understanding of identity expressed through positioning, resistance, relation, and imagination. The essay critiques limiting frameworks like Afrocentricity and Black Nationalism while honoring their historical importance.
​
Focus: Reclaiming Black identity as authored
Themes: Creolization, relational identity, Afrofuturism, edutainment
Skills: Theoretical synthesis, model development, critical writing, media analysis
🔶 Script Excerpt – Stellar Echoes and the Lost Logs of Shanilei, Episode 07: “An Encounter of Escape”
This Afrofuturist script excerpt translates theoretical insights into narrative form, following Shanilei as she confronts cultural erasure in a sanitized utopia. The full episode dramatizes key concepts like diasporic memory, intuitive knowledge, and chosen kinship. It positions speculative fiction as a method of theoretical intervention, merging storytelling with cultural critique.
Focus: Making cultural theory felt through story
Themes: Memory, resistance, belonging, narrative authorship
Skills: Scriptwriting, Afrofuturist worldbuilding, poetic dialogue, symbolic design
