Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

Mitochondrial Eve

Mitochondrial Eve tracks the trajectory of Black women as an archetypal mother. Mitochondrial eve (Mt-MRCA), who biological anthropologists have imagined as a dark-skinned sub-Saharan woman, and the desire for her mapped on the bodies of Black women in the 20th and 21st centuries, is the protagonist of this project. Through tracing Black women and their relationship to motherhood, I also consider these questions about our mother’s disconnection from her children split at the rupture of the concept of the human. Through video, sonnets, prose poems, and lyric, Mitochondrial Eve takes up the emotive landscape of both possibility and loss.