| dc.description.abstract | This project focuses on N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and examines the way she narrates flesh and land in her speculative fiction. Jemisin utilizes Afrofuturist neo-slave narrative to challenge past and present racial hierarchies to imagine paths towards racial abolition. Framed by Katherine McKittrick’s and Christina Sharpe’s work on literature, black feminist geographies and the aftermath of slavery, this thesis examines how past histories are embedded in flesh and land. Jemisin, I argue, confronts such racialized geographies of domination and imagines future liberation. Chapter one, “‘Speakable’ Lands: Black Geography and Past/Present Speculations”, provides a theoretical framework and explores specific geographies of domination and liberation to create spaces for overcoming. Chapter two, “Non/Being: Embodying the Past in the Governed Borders of Humanness,” explores how past histories produce flesh and land embodiments. The thesis concludes with reflecting on how Jemisin re-visions the future. | |
