Paola Ravasio, Associated Research Fellow, CIAS Bielefeld, Germany
The ensuing discussion argues that historical imagination functions as a highly abstract metaphor for home and sets out to analyze the representation of the womb and menstrual blood in 21st-century black diasporic writing as re-signifying the place and nature of historical imagination. The womban-trope found in spoken word poet and artivist Queen Nzinga Maxwell constitutes the object of study here, which is approached as an unconventional metaphor for thinking about home, belonging, and exile in the context of the African diaspora, then and now. Asserting that history functions as symbolic capital in the consolidation of belongingness, I shall attempt to answer the ensuing question: how is the womban-trope like ‘home’?