A Layin on of Hands: Black Feminist Healing Arts as Wake Work

A Layin on of Hands: Black Feminist Healing Arts as Wake Work explores the work of two Black femme artists who engage in ritualized theater performance. This thesis examines the creations of Oakland-based artist Amara Tabor Smith, a ritual dance theater artist, and New York-based theater ceremonialist Ebony Noelle Golden. The project examines each artist’s unique artistic and spiritual practices as forms of immaterial, emotional, psychic, and social intervention in the afterlives of slavery, which impact Black life. Methodologically, this thesis depends on oral histories, performance analysis, and participant observation to document and explore the emotional, ecological, and spiritual effects that both artists’ work has on their collaborators, their communities, and the legacies of enslavement. This project draws on Saidiya Hartman’s theory of the “afterlives of slavery,” Christina Sharpe’s theory and praxis of “Wake Work,” and concepts of Black feminist hauntology to argue that the afterlives of slavery function as haints — shapeshifting, material, and metaphysical manifestations of anti-Blackness — that influence Black life. By blending their spiritual and artistic practices, these artists exorcise such haints from their communities by challenging hegemonic systems of knowledge and embracing indigenous epistemologies, cosmologies, and ancestral practices, providing their communities with psychic, emotional, and spiritual relief and liberation.