Dreaming in the Wake: Afrofuturist Remedies for White Supremacist Patriarchal Encounters in Higher Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Rest as an Extraordinary Literacy: Black Women Educators Reclaiming Power Through Stillness, Silence, Silliness, and Refusal

Abstract

This paper explores dyasporic dreaming as an extraordinary literacy and Afrofuturist remedy for navigating and transcending the daily violences of the white supremacist patriarchal (WSP) academy. As a Black Caribbean American scholar and teacher educator, I engage in critical narrative inquiry to examine two visceral encounters with WSP logics—encounters that punctuate and pattern life in predominantly white institutions. Grounded in Staples-Dixon’s (2023, 2024) theory of extraordinary literacies—the soulful, spiritual, somatic, and sociocultural practices that facilitate interior excavation and ancestral attunement—this work takes seriously dreaming as a divinely guided, spiritually strategic response to epistemic and ontological erasure.

Building on Seraphin’s (2023) concept of dyasporic dreaming and Sharpe’s (2016) theorization of wake work, I position dreaming as a sociospiritual and political act that draws from Haitian Vodou cosmology and Haitian feminist knowledge systems (Jean-Charles, 2018). Dyasporic dreaming activates ancestral technologies to identify, survive, and transmute the wake—the lingering trauma and psychic debris of slavery, colonialism, and their institutional afterlives. These dreaming practices constitute empyreal dialectics (Staples-Dixon, 2024): sacred logics of resistance, restoration, and realignment that operate outside the constraints of grind culture and institutional respectability.

In querying these encounters through a dyasporic dreaming lens, I not only name the racialized and gendered assaults on my humanity, intellect, and spirit but also conjure alternate futures—scenarios in which I remain spiritually intact, pedagogically whole, and cosmologically aligned. By engaging imagination as an insurgent act and rest as resistance, this paper asserts that dreaming is not escapism, but an embodied literacy of liberation. Dyasporic dreaming becomes a site of spiritual rest and narrative reconstitution—what Hersey (2022) calls “a sacred refusal.”

Ultimately, I argue that Black women educators’ capacity to survive, thrive, and transform our learning spaces is deeply tied to our ability to dream beyond the constraints of the present. Dreaming becomes both sanctuary and strategy: a site where the soul rests, the spirit recalibrates, and new portals to liberatory praxis open. As a form of extraordinary literacy, dyasporic dreaming offers Black women not only a means of resisting white supremacist patriarchal structures but a method for authoring more divine and dignified futures.

References

Seraphin, W. (2023). Dyasporic dreaming: the extraordinary literacies and superpowers of Haitian and Haitian American Girls. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 36:7, 1212-1227, https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2022.2061067

Jean-Charles, R.M. (2018). Occupying the center: Haitian girlhood and wake work. Small Axe 22(3), 140-150. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/710218.

Sharpe, C. E. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being (1st ed.). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373452

Staples-Dixon, J. M. (2023). Extraordinary literacies & empyreal logics: regarding the
everyday praxises of black girls and women in schools and society. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 36(7), 1207-1211. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2023.2203100

Author

• Wideline Seraphin, University of Texas - Arlington