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Christen Smith

Speaker
Christen Smith
Date
Mon February 10th 2025, 3:30 - 5:00pm
Location
Building 50, Room 51A

Frequency: Black Women in the Atlantic is a meditation on Black women’s experiences with violence and freedom in the Atlantic world. Written in three acts, this project reflects on terror, flight and transmutation/transcendence in what Black Brazilian intellectual Beatriz Nascimento calls the Atlantic-Mother (Atlântico-Mãe): the sea that cradles Black life and death. Here, I engage with Black women’s stories of violence, escape and freedom across generations and geographies to rethink time, space and matter in the Atlantic world. Grounded in Black feminist anthropological methods and philosophy, this meditation is structured around three acts examining violence, healing and transcendence. Starting from the axis of Brazil, I urge us to shift our attention away from the global North, towards the global South to understand the dynamics of gendered anti-Blackness and create the salves necessary to heal the wounds it creates. We must gaze through Black women’s eyes southward and toward the sea, stand on our heads, and reframe the world from the bottom (South) up, rather than the top (North) down, to diagnose, heal and imagine new possibilities of life and freedom.