Project details

Cycles of return references water as the central body, moving through memory and mourning, asking how does the body imagine and experience time when moving through waywardness as a permanent state? What are the temporal and traditional lenses engaging with this discourse on movement, citizenship and the imaginary across Black diasporic communities? 

This research speaks to rituals of departure, looking further into the different ways the body continues to move, in pursuit of ‘imagining otherwise’. The lives of ‘wayward’ womxn across Black diasporic communities sits at the centre of this research, referencing the works of Malika Booker, Aracelis Girmay and Saidiya Hartman to name a few. To be ‘wayward’ as a form of care and resistance as Joy James describes ‘in pursuit of love’. This research project centres poetics as a way of thinking critically about dreaming and movement as a practice. 

To be marooned, a fugitive in flight, is not always a bad thing. It can only mean, at the best of times, that one is pursuing love. – Joy James. 

Sumia Jaama works as a Research Lecturer for this project.  

credit: image Sawti x Somaalinimo till I Dhimo