Pembroke Center

Tara M. Holman’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.