“Look a Negro!”: self-authorship, self-definition, and the wake of anti-blackness

In this manuscript, I lift Black feminisms as a methodological intervention on a holistic meaning-making theory and its relationship to anti-Blackness. Specifically, I employed a Black feminist literary criticism, which presumes that Black people have cultivated living and survival practices throughout their history in the United States. I analyzed 7 full-length books and essays written by James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Additionally, in attending to Black feminist theorizing, I used creative prose to situate myself in the text by locating the curated findings from the literary analysis in my mother’s rearing practices. Pointing to the historical ways Black people have lived in the wake of anti-Black structures, I depart from the meaning-making pathways articulated by self-authorship and point to the possibilities of self-defining praxis for Black people.