"We See You Baby; We Know Your Name": The Praxes & Poetics of Black(Q) Identity (Re)construction and Necrographic Divinatory Embodiment as Community Care

This project takes an autoethnographic and interdisciplinary approach to consider how poetry, physical theatre, and explorative ethnography can help render the lived-in intimacies of U.S. Black(Q) life and sensation within the scholarship surrounding Black(Q)ness and Black(Q) people in the social sciences. In 2020, during the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic and major instances of Black rebellion and protest against police brutality and anti-Black violence in the United States, I became the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for SAPIENS Anthropology magazine. Along with helping the magazine shore up a foundation in theorizing and applying anthropological (ethnographic) poetry, I used my time with SAPIENS to develop my own unique method of Black (auto)ethnographic poetry, necro-graphic divination. This method is a practice of anthropological (auto)ethnography that combines and employs a series of interdisciplinary sub-methodologies (qualitative content analysis, necrography-making, poetry and Black culturally dialectical language, and Black speculative narration) to render a fullness to the Black lives of those of our community who have lost their lives to state-sponsored violences, police brutality, and anti-Black and anti-Black Queer cruelties. I then put this method into practice, merging the necrographic divinatory framework with training models of activist methods of physical theatre to practice empowerment through the creative arts by working with Black youth ages 8-18 to produce embodied oral histories during my time as Teaching Artist in Residence for the Black Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

In this two-part project (the crafting and theorizing work done with SAPIENS and the practical application with the Black Rep), I explore the following research questions: How do we facilitate narratives about Black(Q) life that render a fullness to Black(Q) experiences in social scientific research? How do we practice methods of storytelling that shed light on the everywhere and everyways of unspectatcularized Black(Q) living that have always existed within, outside of, and around the context of highly spectacularized Black(Q) death? I also use this project to construct a platform for centering the stories of Black(Q) interlocutors, dead and alive, particularly within the time frame of 2012 –present-day, but necessarily highlighting the stories and enduring histories of violence, Black(Q) subjugation, and brutality throughout the periods of U.S. enslavement, Jim Crow laws, and segregation. I employ this method to craft alternative/speculative/imaginative spaces to witness the fullness of Black(Q) life for our Black(Q) dead and our Black(Q) living; spaces unentrenched by the lasting negative mediatization (the ways representations within mass media define and/or entrench social/cultural beliefs) of Black people and their bodies as rendered by U.S. nationalistic imaginations in contemporary media.

In this two-part project (the crafting and theorizing work done with SAPIENS and the practical application with the Black Rep), I explore the following research questions: How do we facilitate narratives about Black(Q) life that render a fullness to Black(Q) experiences in social scientific research? How do we practice methods of storytelling that shed light on the everywhere and everyways of unspectatcularized Black(Q) living that have always existed within, outside of, and around the context of highly spectacularized Black(Q) death? I also use this project to construct a platform for centering the stories of Black(Q) interlocutors, dead and alive, particularly within the time frame of 2012 –present-day, but necessarily highlighting the stories and enduring histories of violence, Black(Q) subjugation, and brutality throughout the periods of U.S. enslavement, Jim Crow laws, and segregation. I employ this method to craft alternative/speculative/imaginative spaces to witness the fullness of Black(Q) life for our Black(Q) dead and our Black(Q) living; spaces unentrenched by the lasting negative mediatization (the ways representations within mass media define and/or entrench social/cultural beliefs) of Black(Q) people and their bodies as rendered by U.S. nationalistic imaginations in contemporary media.