“A New Spelling of My Name”: Becoming a (Black, Feminist, Immigrant) Autoethnographer ThroughZami

Abstract

In this article, I provide the historical context for the reception of Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami’s by Black women across the African diaspora as a backdrop for my own autoethnographic engagement of the book. I narrate my journey to claiming space within the field of autoethnography by anchoring my discussion in Zami and its themes. The goal of this work is to illustrate the crucial nature of autoethnographic work to transnational Black feminism, and its ongoing importance to women from and in marginalized communities.

WITHDRAWN: Braiding as a Feminist Methodology: Tensions and Possibilities of Weaving Together

“… 18. Tanja Burkhard (2020) shared some of her educational experiences on the topic of racial representation, while growing up in Germany. She wrote that she felt anger at the thought of never having “learned about Lorde’s transnational feminist activism—or any other histories of women of color organizing.…”

Against abstraction: Reclaiming and reorienting to embodied collective knowledges of solidarity

“…We follow Indigenous geographers, Black geographers, and geographers of colour before us who have used autobiography and autoethnography to trace racialized and gendered knowledge moves in the discipline (Cahuas, 2022;Daigle, 2019;Pulido, 2010) in order to "reimagine what constitutes geographical research" (Cahuas, 2022(Cahuas, : 1514. As Tanja Burkhard (2019) writes, autoethnography is a methodology by which scholars of color come to grapple with not having the language to describe their lives, interweaving literature and analysis with memories, journal entries and marginalia to create new terms in which to represent their lived experience. Further, the culturally distinct Chicanx/Latinx feminist methodology of testimonio transforms knowledge production through "reworking what constitutes knowledge, asserting that knowledge is produced relationally and collectively, and connecting research to social change" (Cahuas, 2022(Cahuas, : 1517.…”