Biography
Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer + performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia currently pursuing a doctoral degree in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work tends to the relationships between Black femininity, aesthetics, and the performance of labor. She is the co-convener of an Oakland-based experiential study group called The Church of Black Feminist Thought and member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic.
Research
Answering Black feminist study’s call for a new conceptual reckoning with Black women’s labors and the structures of care, resistance and exhaustion that they imprint on our world, my dissertation project tends to the ways Black women make sense of themselves in relation to local and global — historical and contemporary — trade circuits. Geographically, this project examines circum-Caribbean sites that hold a literal and figurative proximity to sites of enslavement and now exist as tourist economies. In doing so, this project thinks critically about the ways black femininity marks and is marked by the space around it. Engaging movement and creative expression generated from these fraught places, this project thinks about “marking” as a black feminist mode of embodied critique. In Louisiana, I center the work of visual artist Clementine Hunter (1888-1998) in concert with contemporary understandings of the relationships between black femininity and labor evidenced in the work of Black women cultural producers. These artists utilize distinctly Black southern vernacular aesthetics that I argue carry and transform the mark of 19th century plantation economies. Engaging these artists in their shared and divergent historical contexts requires deep and sometimes unconventional archival engagements. Thus, this is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project that utilizes traditional ethnographic methods and site-specific archival research alongside humanistic textual analysis to think critically about the ways Black women across time and space relate to, embrace and challenge the cultural, political and economic landscapes around them.
Organized around three principle interrelated sites of performance – The Plantation, The Market and The Digital – This project is an attempt to hold, aggregate and theorize black women’s strategic negotiations of labor and commodification. A main feature that holds these three sites together is a sensual and aesthetic engagement with “the Black feminine”.
Particularly as it relates to processes of aesthetic articulation or ‘mark making’ (across the mediums of visual art, self-fashioning, and dance) and labor (domestic labor, erotic labor, reproduction, artistic production, cultural production) throughout the African Diaspora.
