Title of Abstract: Peeling Away
Name of Mentors: Dr. Adanna Jones & Professor Willi Lempert
Mentor’s Organizations or Departments: Department of Theater and Dance; Department of Anthropology
Research Abstract: “Peeling Away” is what came from my reaction to the uprisings for Black lives that erupted at the start of this summer following George Floyd’s murder. I was interested in diving into me and my family’s lineages and how we see ourselves fitting into the system of American racism, so that I might be able to better take responsibility for my own role in it. As a half-white, half-Chinese person, I wanted to interrogate the nuanced power dynamics that shape my racial identity, specifically my relationship to whiteness. My central question around decolonizing my body does not refer to decolonization as the historical, social, or political process of removing colonial administrations, but as the act of undoing the legacies of harm left by colonization in my embodied reality. This video is not an answer, but the start of my ongoing reckoning with this question.
