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The academic, philosopher, and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva's essay Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World, where she maps out speculative strategies for refusing categories of racial otherness by rethinking space, time, bodily materiality and relations by activating Black Feminist Critique thus creating the end of the world as constructed by Western philosophical and sociological terms. Ferreira da Silva's argument concludes with the revision of time, space, linearity, and being by unpacking the complexities of virtuality by activating the terms Transsubstantiality, Transversability, and Traversability. She turns to the Black female protagonist in African-American sci-fi writer novelist, Octavia Estelle Butler's book Parable of the Sower, Kindred, and Wildseed to illustrate her line of thought. I am interested in the term Traversabilty as she relates it to Butler’s character Dana from Kindred, who non-consensually is snatched back to antebellum Maryland to save her slave-owning ancestor from various scenarios of death to ensure her existence. Dana is a time traveler for the sake of her survival while being embedded in the total violence of plantation life. Ferreira da Silva establishes Traversablity as a methodology for world-building and the critical aspect of survival in a non-linear framework. In my paper, I will think through Traversablity, Transversability, and Transusbstantiality, as methodologies for worlding in Virtual Reality, Mixed reality, and immersive environments.
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Clareese Hill - Northeastern University (M.A., United States)