Dissertation Title and Summary
My dissertation, tentatively titled “Dis Place: How Black Women Haunt American Landscapes from the 20th Century to the Present,” is a multimodal project consisting of a written manuscript and an immersive media exhibition. I focus on Black women in the United States and the Caribbean whose practice and production of African-derived and -syncretic spiritualities guide their transit across the Americas. I am interested in how these Black feminists and spiritual practitioners are infrastructural to modern geography often below the threshold of perception, elemental to modern life, and mythological in the collective imagination.
To engage these women as critical cartographers, infrastructural to modern geography yet mythological in the collective imagination, I examine spatial media that faithfully (mis)represent them — the landscapes they occupy, the maps that symbolize spatial data at their locales, and cultural production that depict them in spaces they produce and transit across. Some of my literary and cultural objects include a 3D-rendering of my great-grandmother’s home in Georgetown, Guyana, a crowdsourced map of global electricity consumption, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I approach these literal and speculative locales and their (mis)representations as nodes or connecting points along these women’s travels across the Caribbean, North America, a mythical island, and their afterlives.
Bio
Christin Washington is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of American Studies and a Flagship Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a Graduate Research Assistant with the African American Digital & Experimental Humanities (AADHum) research and design lab. Her scholarship stretches media and modes of digital storytelling (that is photography, photogrammetry, laser scanning, virtual reality) to articulate cultural memory across black geographies. Christin holds a Master’s in American Studies, a Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities (DSAH) certificate, and a Museum Scholarship and Material Culture (MSMC) certificate from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is an alumna of Amherst College where she graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Black Studies and Political Science.