Cuerppo

Abstract

The thesis examines the role of influence in Weems’s Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008) through a series of close readings and appropriative acts that blend critical analysis and creative writing. The close readings illustrate the influence of other artists, media, genres, and histories, which Weems uses to construct a historical continuity that validates and inserts people previously left out of history. The appropriations mimic Weems’s process and applies them to academic writing through the placement of images, an imagined script, and paratext. By doing so, I insert Weems, myself, other people, Constructing History and other works by Weems, science, art, music, literature, religion, and histories into the body of the thesis. The result is a thesis whose form is also the content, expressing and embodying Weems’s use of influence to rethink, re-see, re-experience, and re-witness the past.