“This Joy That I Have”: Black Feminist Performance Autoethnography as Presencing Time

• In Event: Creative Coalitions: Considering Counterstories, Identity, and Performance

Abstract

These analyses focus on how autoethnographic performance asserts ontological claims on the present, challenging and resisting racializing structures. The work is grounded in three key areas of literature: Black feminist theories of the human (Wynter, 2003, 2006), critical methodologies, and Black creative activities. It employs Black feminist futurity (Campt, 2017) as a theoretical framework to investigate the potentialities of performance autoethnography as a methodology of "livingness" (McKittrick, 2021). Through this lens, the manuscript revisits a "scene of subjection" (Hartman, 1997) to question what possibilities autoethnography offers for understanding and inhabiting the present moment. The paper concludes with a discussion on the ethical considerations inherent in autoethnographic inquiry.

Author

• Wilson Kwamogi Okello, Pennsylvania State University