The Department of English would like to congratulate D’Arcee Neal on winning first place honors in the Humanities Division of the 35^th Annual Hayes Graduate Research Forum! Neal’s presentation, “Hearing a Black Ghost Made Flesh: ‘Three-ness’ and the Afrophantasmic,” is a multimodal collage of science-fiction narrative and scholarly essay that critiques the concept of Afrofuturism 2.0 while theorizing Black disabled phenomenology. This is the second year in a row that a student in the Department of English has taken home top honors at the Hayes Forum; Sean Yeager won the Humanities Division in 2020 with his presentation, “Visualizing the Temporal Space of Narratives.” 

Neal further explains his project as follows: “Amidst the clarion calls for Black vitality this past summer, alongside the blockbuster successes of Afrofuturist fantasies like Black Panther and Altered Carbon, the recognition for disability remains a phantom among the Black community where race supersedes even the intersectional weight of physicality... Combining ideas like Debra Walker King’s (2008) concept of psychic Black pain, futuristic soundscapes and performances of digital ‘signifyin’ (Gates, 1988), I aim to create a different kind of scholarly storytelling that recognizes the power in an embodied trifecta [of body, mind and community]. In a complex mix of identity and physicality, it is my way to reclaim Black disability and to reorient the conversation of the posthuman Black body to one that truly envisions and includes us all.” 

Congratulations to D’Arcee Neal on this exciting achievement!