Stanford Humanities Center
Seyi Osundeko is a PhD Candidate in English at Stanford University. She holds a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation investigates practices of self-mourning in women through African and Black diasporic literature. Other areas of interest include postcolonial feminism and creative writing.
SHC Project
Tears Still Fall: The Contours of Feminine Self-Mourning in Contemporary African and Black Diasporic Literature
Osundeko's dissertation investigates self-mourning, especially distress over one’s gendered cultural context. The term “self-mourning” is often used to describe grieving one’s imminent death. But what is self-mourning without mortality? If we understand mourning as expressing grief, and grief as sorrow, regret, and distress from loss, how might we understand the mourning of intangible or systemic losses? In this construction, self-mourning is not just grieving oneself: it is grieving the conditions that made the self. It is grieving interrupted and potential selves. Put another way, rather than grieving the fact that one must die, it means grieving the ways in which one must live. This mourning is thus not temporally bound, nor is it teleological. How can one “move through” deprivation that is constant, or “get over” loss that occurs over and over? What is the benefit of obtaining a new love object when it is really the quality of possession that is problematic? This project puts forth a new framework for navigating mourning by centering the mourning of self and its implications in contemporary African and Black diasporic literature.
