Celia "Newsom" -- a radical resister
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This dissertation is the work of recovery and repair to rethink the narrative of Celia, an enslaved pregnant woman, who took the life of her owner, Robert Newsom, with or without assistance, as an act of strategic resistance. Each chapter seeks to illuminate the gaps, erasures, and silences about the humanity of Celia and enslaved women like her, whose bodies experienced sexual exploitation and trauma for which words and stories are difficult to confirm and assimilate into a single narrative defined by one truth. This paper is also a think-space project that troubled my haunted comfort zone around sexual violence, to honor the memory of Black women like Celia, whose motherhood, humanity, and voice were denied and then lost in time. Affect and assemblage theory are the primary theoretical interventions I navigated to capture haunting vulnerability or feelings as knowledge. The writing component is an experiment in being permeable to my sexual assault journey, while simultaneously thinking and writing on the edges of autoethnography with a slice of integrated crystallization. Ultimately, I created an inquiry process that provided analytical tools that aided in shaping meaning for me and supplanted themselves as a virtual human body, a kind of stand-in, or in-between space between the past and present.
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Ph. D.