Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

My current work, Umi’s Archive, is a scholarly exploration into the life of one woman, Amina Amatul Haqq (1950-2017), née Audrey Weeks, whom I called umi (Arabic for my mother). The project is grounded in everyday Black communities’ deep investment in memory that rejects the idea of African-descended people as having no history. I also follow Black feminist provocations to reimagine archives in creative and speculative ways and respond to calls to “Cite Black Women”. My relationship to the archive is as archivist, analyst, and part of the archive itself; accordingly, through this project I embrace the ways in which the personal and social dimensions of research are tied and the attendant questions of methodology.