What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.

—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965

Camille Owens

Niki Kekos
June 4, 2019

Camille Owens is a PhD candidate in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale. Her research areas include nineteenth-century racial science, performances of blackness and disability, visual culture, and the history of childhood.

Yale University, Ph.D.