Let Her Rest: A Womanist Approach to the Afterlife Archive

Abstract

This thesis examines how Black girls enter and remain within institutional archives through histories of racial violence, premature death, and dispossession. Grounded in womanist thought, anthropology, Africana religious studies, spiritual care, and Black studies, this research argues that the archive is an active site where Black bodies continue to be subjected to material and spiritual violence. Through an examination of the “Venus,” this paper argues that there is a historical lineage of Black girls who enter the archive through conditions of subjugation. Katricia “Tree” Africa, one of the children killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a central case for this thesis. After the MOVE bombing, Katricia Africa’s remains were held for decades within academic institutions. This thesis explores how the archive renders Black girls legible only through violence and their death. This paper employs an interdisciplinary methodological approach drawing from Black studies, anthropology, religious studies, and womanist thought. I approach the archive as an active site shaped by power, violence, and institutions. For this paper, the archive refers to a place where information, documents, records, or bodies are held. This methodological approach seeks to understand the particularity of how Black girls enter the archive while also attending to what exceeds the archive’s capacity to capture their interior lives. Traditional historical methods prioritize recovery, completeness, or evidentiary accumulation, which are insufficient for addressing the ethical demands raised by the manner in which Black girls, such as Katricia Africa, enter the archive. This methodology resists extractive, normative research practices that treat Black death as an object of study divorced from the researcher’s own ethical stakes. Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation is used in this research as a theoretical framework for narrating and understanding lives irrecoverable by violence. Michael Omi and Howard Winant provide a theoretical framework for racialization to understand the systemic process by which Black girls enter the archive. This thesis calls for ethical and spiritually informed approaches to Black human remains in the archive and asks what it means to tell these stories and allow Black girls to finally rest beyond the violence of the archive.