African History Commons^™

Assata Shakur: The Battle For Memory In The Imagined Borderlands, Joe Kaplan

Summer Research

This work focuses on the former Black Panther, Assata Shakur, and her exile in Cuba. It probes Shakur’s identification with the maroon, or escaped slave, to examine how the experience of exile creates a sense of rootlessness and alienation from national identity, and how memory can come to reshape one’s inclusion within various “imagined communities.” Shakur occupies a liminal space, a borderlands existence, between the two nations in which she has lived. I trace her memories of the terror she experienced in the U.S, the ethnocentrism inherent in the act of becoming American, and how her imagination has been shaped …