Black Life: Ra Malika Imhotep

Programmed by Ryanaustin Dennis and Chika Okoye

Ra Malika Imhotep presents The Cotton Patch—Memory Writing, a performative lecture and writing workshop drawing on Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory.” Participants are invited to reflect on the contours of their own memory and swim through a collective memory bank in search of the poetry that is already ours.

Ra Malika Imhotep is a black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia, currently pursuing a doctoral degree in African diaspora studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation project engages the relationships between black femininity, aesthetics, and the performance of labor. Her creative praxis is invested in a textual and embodied interrogation of “the primitive,” “the erotic,” and the historical present. Co-convener of the experimental study group The Church of Black Feminist Thought and a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic, she is currently an artist in residence at Ashara Ekundayo Gallery.