Date of Award
5-2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School
Humanities
Committee Chair
Dr. Angela Ball
Committee Chair School
Humanities
Committee Member 2
Dr. Emily Stanback
Committee Member 2 School
Humanities
Committee Member 3
Dr. Christopher Spaide
Committee Member 3 School
Humanities
Committee Member 4
Dr. Jennifer Peterson
Committee Member 4 School
Humanities
Abstract
Daughters of the Dreamline is a long-poem project inscribed within the Afropolitan orientation of twenty-first-century African cosmopolitan and African diaspora movements. Drawing on the stylistic influence of M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong!, the project is a lyrical assemblage of poetically retold individual stories of African(a) women across different generations, both living and dead, on the home continent and across its diaspora. In a deeply conscious response to Lucille Clifton’s poetic imagination, as manifest in her major lyrical works, including Good Times, Good News about the Earth, An Ordinary Woman, and Two-headed Woman, and to Jahan Ramazani’s critical position on a “transnational poetics,” the long poem highlights and interrogates female agency through ethno-biographical profiles of African women whose lives, times, and accomplishments are valorized and their failings underscored in an elegiac tradition. The poetic imagination in Daughters of the Dreamline cuts through points of spatial, cultural, and ideological intersection where the very essence of imagined African and Black communities cohere, becoming lyrically eloquent through the long poem’s poetic pastiche.
ORCID ID
0009-0000-0145-1549
Copyright
2026
Recommended Citation
Bello, Abiodun Muyideen, "Daughters of the Dreamline" (2026). Dissertations. 2461.
https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/2461