🔶 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
