Extracting Life-giving Strength from my Roots: An Endarkened Feminist (Auto)Nkwaethnography of Navigating Tenure as a Black Woman at a Predominantly White Institution

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.5.1.0007
• Pages: 70-88
• Published date: 14 October 2022
• Date: 14 October 2022
• Author: Ayana Allen-Handy
• Subject Matter: endarkened feminist epistemologies,intersectionality,autoethnography,nkwaethnography,Black women,predominantly white institutions,tenure

70 Volume Five, Number One

“Extracting Life-giving Strength from my Roots” — Allen-Handy

Extracting Life-giving Strength from my Roots: An Endarkened Feminist

(Auto)Nkwaethnography of Navigating Tenure as a Black Woman at a

Predominantly White Institution

Ayana Allen-Handy, Ph.D.

Drexel University

Abstract: This auto nkwa (life-arming) ethnography shares a Black woman’s jour ney to tenure at

a predominantly white institution (PWI). Grounded in endarkened feminist epistemologies, the author

weaves together elements of intersectionality, critical autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and Black

womanist traditions to share rst-person accounts of how she navigated the socio-cultural and socio-

political institutional context to ultimately become the rst Black woman to ear n tenure in the School

of Education’s history at her university. In connecting the personal to theory and theory to praxis, the

author illuminates how PWIs must undertake anti-racist and justice-orientations in order to fully center

and support Black women’s ways of knowing and being in the tenure and promotion process, ultimately

ensuring their long-term success.

Keywords: endarkened feminist epistemologies, intersectionality, autoethnography, nkwaethnography,

Black women, predominantly white institutions, tenure

Prelude

As I sit down to write this autoethnography, I just read an article that literally changed my life

forever. In my exploration of other Black women faculty autoethnographies, I came across a piece

entitled: “Endarkened Feminism and Sacred Praxis: Troubling (Auto) Ethnography through Critical

Engagements with African Indigenous Knowledges.”1 Where has this article been my whole entire

academic life? I’m deeply disturbed that I have never come across it before. Nonetheless, I’m

reading a gut wrenching autoethnographic account of the authors’ experiences at the Cape Coast

slave dungeon in Ghana and read the following line as if in sloooooowwww motion: “There can

be no auto-ethnography from an endarkened feminist framework. What is needed is a dierent

ethnography, beyond the prex “auto” or singular version of ethnography to gesture toward the

prex “trans” or beyond the singular, multiple of nature.”2 Wow, #mindblown and now I must

recalibrate and try this again.

Introducon: From Auto to Nkwa Ethnography

“Nkwa” (sacred or life arming in Twi) ethnography transforms my previous understandings

1 Dillard and Bell 2011.

2 Ibid: 344.

Journal of Intersectionality

71DOI: 10.13169/jinte.5.1.0007

of the method of autoethnography. Nkwaethnography is an African-centered ethnographic

research approach that aords African ascendant individuals a way by which to engage in a deeply

introspective and sacred self-research process at the myriad intersections of their identities.3 While

returning back home to the Cape Coast slave dungeon in Ghana, the literal gateway of forced

exodus of our ancestors, Dillard and Bell trouble autoethnography and its utility to support all of

the facets of their embodied and spiritual experiences:

What we needed was a kind of ethnography that truly honored the

complexities of the Indigenous and the ‘modern’ that we’d experienced

in our bodies, minds, and spirits. Something both dialogical and multiple.

Both spiritual and sacred. Something both historical and cultural.

Something that honored the uidity of time and space, of the material

and spiritual world. Mostly we needed an ethnography that acknowledged

both the joy and pain of location, dislocation, and the transformation of

both in our stories: African women are not stories of a singular self but

are stories of we, collective stories deeply embedded in African women’s

wisdom and Indigenous knowledges.4

Hence, the emergence of nkwaethnog raphy-hence a healing methodology.5 As a Black

woman, I nd a deep interior connection as I grapple with pivoting from “auto” to “nkwa” in this

self-study of navigating tenure at a predominantly white institution (PWI).

Autoethnography has traditionally provided a much-needed space for me to unpack

my experiences and to attempt to connect the personal to the cultural, the storying of (my)self-

engulfed in social context.6 Grounded in experience and often written in evocative prose, Boylorn

shares that autoethnography is poised to provoke other stories.7 As an autoethnographer, I have

often wavered back and forth in the paradigmatic tug of war between evocative and analytic

autoethnography.8 However, in order to bring forth my nkwa (life arming) story, I must write for

evocation and evocation only. Similar to the autoethnographic accounts of navigating the academy

of Grin, Boylorn, and Jones et al., I yearn for my story to join in harmony with other Black

women who have, who are, and who will navigate academic life… across all levels- undergraduate,

graduate, doctoral, tenure track, non-tenure track, mid-career, full, distinguished, as well as across

transnational boundaries.9 In this space, I strive to illuminate how my experiences and the interplay

of my intersectional identities10 make room for our collective endeavors, our collective strength,

and for that it is worth it. It is worth it to go deep, to not hold back, to relinquish my story so

that it can illuminate the contours of the academy that are so deeply in and in need of (dis)repair.

3 Dillard and Bell 2011.

4 Ibid: 343.

5 Dillard 2008.

6 Ellis 1997; Ellis and Bochner 2000.

7 Boylorn 2008.

8 Chang 2016.

9 Dillard and Bell 2011.

10 Crenshaw 1990.