Unbroken Photography: Towards an Ethics of Agency in Grace Nichols’ &quot;i is a long memoried woman&quot; and “Picasso, I Want My Face Back”

Persistent URL of this record https://hdl.handle.net/1887/77798

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Media Studies (MA)

Kalverda, Hannah (2019)

Unbroken Photography: Towards an Ethics of Agency in Grace Nichols’ "i is a long memoried woman" and “Picasso, I Want My Face Back”

Master thesis | Media Studies (MA)

In her book-length works "i is a long memoried woman" and “Picasso, I Want My Face Back,” the Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols uses poetry to give a voice to a particular woman in history. The lyrical subjects speaking in these works, an unnamed enslaved woman and the artist Dora Maar, respectively, bear witness to the past injustices they have endured. Through close reading, I show that both testimonial accounts address not only the historical violence suffered by these women but also the epistemic violence perpetrated by a modernist representation of them in writing and in painting. This epistemic violence presents them as non-agents, in crisis and as victims. I argue that at the heart of Nichols’ two testimonial projects lies an ethics of agency which not only seeks to make these particular women’s voices heard, but which also presents a mode of writing that demonstrates their agency as an inspiration for future women’s voices.