Samantha Adams

"A Body of Water Inside Me: Water Shaping African American Life and Literature Beyond the Atlantic Ocean"

“A body of water inside me / Reminds me of oceans, / Though I’ve never known one / I’m born by a cold one / It’s only a small one compared/ To the coast, I prefer it to most…” These lines from Chicago singer, songwriter and poet Jamila Woods reflect my personal and critical orientation to the relationships between Black Americans and bodies of water. As a Milwaukeean who grew up 3 miles west of Lake Michigan, I learned it was a part of something larger than itself—one of the largest bodies of freshwater, and a part of a larger Great Lakes basin. I learned the stench of the dead alewives washed ashore, how cold it is nearly year-round, I learned that wealthy families could privatize portions of the beach, a worn twine rope dividing where I could venture and where I could not. Alongside this knowledge, I learned that I, like Woods, much preferred the murky, cold, waters of Lake Michigan to the warmest ocean water. My dissertation names and seeks to unsettle what I see as a critical preoccupation with the Atlantic Ocean’s relationship to the study of Black life and African American literature in the wake of chattel slavery. My dissertation engages these questions: How do overlooked bodies of water including swimming pools, hurricane floodwaters, and freshwater lakes shape African American literature and life? What material, symbolic and historical affordances does water as a form offer to the study of African American life and literature? Through feminist autotheory and close reading with sensitivity toward the material, historical and symbolic relationships between Black subjects and forms of water, I engage periodical archives, poetry, and novels to expand and deepen our knowledge of our connections to overlooked aquatic spaces.

Samantha Adams is a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Women’s & Gender Studies.