Myth, Metaphor, and the Method of Black Worldmaking

This piece stages an encounter between myth and metaphor, positioning Black poetics as an intervention on the Human project and a practice of rewriting the world. Centering poiesis , the creative act of bringing into existence that which otherwise did not exist, the work unfolds through rhythm, memory, and aesthetic experimentation as modes of worldmaking. Drawing on Black feminist auto/ethnography, the piece engages the body and self as sites of critical emergence, relationality, and possibility. Through this methodological grounding, lived experience becomes both raw material and analytic terrain, where the poetic indexes and interrupts the constraints of the present while gesturing toward otherwise futures. Refusing disciplinary coherence, the piece pulls the poetic and analytic into orbit through engagement with Black feminist and Black diasporic thinkers and artists. In doing so, the piece advances Black poetics not simply as representation, but as an epistemological and aesthetic practice for imagining and inhabiting otherwise worlds.