Our Ancestors, Breathing: Works

Abstract

This thesis is a study of m. nourbeSe philip’s 2008 long poem Zong! and Torkwase Dyson’s 2025 sound pavilion Akua. In this study, I pay attention to how each woman discusses and (de)constructs the colonial archive through their commitment to care and communion in communal engagement and through the formal properties of the poetry, performance, sound, and design that comprise their work. Engaging their projects individually, in tandem, and with discourses from archival theory, Black religious studies, Black feminist thought, critical theory, and Black visual studies, I grapple with the possibility and ethics of their projects of spiritual care for the living and the dead. Writing from my experiences of these artists’ works, I present black archival spiritual care, art-centered spiritual communion, and compositional abstraction as analytics through which to critically read the ministerial connotations of their projects.