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Document Type

Open Access Article

Author Biography

Jehan Roberson is a queer writer, scholar, artist, and memory worker using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary practice. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Jehan’s work explores text as a site of liberation, place-making, and historical intervention for Black peoples in the Americas. Her art and research have informed her previous work in archives and cultural sites such as the National Civil Rights Museum and the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Kismet Productions in Chicago, and the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jehan is a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She holds an MA in humanities and social thought and a BA in English literature with a double minor in Spanish and journalism from the University of Missouri.

Abstract

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new ways of knowing and being. Rasheed’s work maps both her own hypertextual engagements while simultaneously enacting a Black feminist approach to literacy, one that recognizes Black women’s textual practices as mapping geographic, corporeal, and psychological sites of resistance.

(In the issue section "Bibliographic Knowledge(s)")

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