Abstract
As the poetic translation of her research on Blueswomen in literature and music, “Bluesing” applies the theory of space creation within a lineage of artists, performers, and everyday women to explore the poetic landscapes created and inherited by Black women. As a self-proclaimed “Blueswoman,” the author situates herself within what she calls a “Black Women’s Blues Continuum,” after Amiri Baraka. This continuum engages in a “tradition of bluesing” which is interdisciplinary, communal, and steeped in storytelling traditions from the church to club. The author dreams, rhapsodizes, translates, retells, and gives voice to stories that are her own, and stories in which she sees a reflection, a resemblance, of the multitude she carries within herself. Roach explores the history of Black Miami through the metaphor of Christina Sharpe’s “wake,” she applies Katherine McKittrick’s way of seeing “demonic grounds” to Overtown and the South Atlantic as tropical terrains of race and migration, and she cartographs her Blues by crafting a series of monuments speaking to place, to people, and the spirit. In “Bluesing,” the author applies an expansive definition of the Blues, which culminates in her idea that Black women are Blue. This idea rejects the masculinized tradition of the Blues found in the Blues Revivalists’ iconography of the “Bluesman” and “Blues People” during the Beat Generation and Black Arts Movement respectively. Roach’s blueswomen emerge from the archive, from the shadows of men, and they explore the stories and metaphors in blackness and the Blues.