Department of English

Tara’s dissertation explores a set of aesthetic terms that constellate an understanding of black
kinship and racial affiliation as conceptually matrilineal. Her project meditates on black maternity
within its colonial enslaved history, and black maternity as ideating reproduction, loss, and the body
splitting and reforming. In praxis, her writing advances a series of interlinked arguments rooted in
and achieved through sustained attention to form and aestheticization, and it labors under the
following tasks: to reconcile the relationship between representation, aesthezication, and
racialization, and to illustrate how black writers trouble and engage the trouble of representing kin.