Audre Lorde’s embodied encounter with the Black goddess: ‘embodied mythology’ as a way of healing, freeing, (re)defining and empowering a damaged narrative identity, Towards a sociogenetic principle of narrative identity in healing racial, sexist and homophobic trauma and reaching renewed self-definition
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2024-09-24
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en
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According to Paul Ricoeur, founder of the narrative identity theory, we are “the narrator of our own story, without becoming the author of our own life”, since we are always already defined by cultural narratives and stories others tell about us. This means that oppressed and discriminated individuals or groups are subject to a damaged identity. Amongst the solutions offered in narrative identity scholarship I miss the role of the body as an inscriptive surface of racial, sexist and homophobic trauma. Parting from Frantz Fanon’s concept of sociogeny and Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenetic principle and epistemology of the human as bios/mythoi, I argue that narrative identity and the body always interact. Through the case study of Audre Lorde’s work, which I bring into conversation with Aimé Césaire’s paradigm of poetry as (self)knowledge, I investigate how ‘embodied mythology’ contributes to the healing, freeing and (re)defining of Lorde’s narrative self.
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Faculteit der Filosofie, Theologie en Religiewetenschappen