Intricate Mastery: Black Female Creative Entrepreneurial Mothers of the Jamaican Diaspora Navigating Power, Positionality and Upward Mobility in Transatlantic spaces

Atkinson, Nathania (2025) Intricate Mastery: Black Female Creative Entrepreneurial Mothers of the Jamaican Diaspora Navigating Power, Positionality and Upward Mobility in Transatlantic spaces. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis advances an original theorisation of Black Female Creative Entrepreneurial Mothers (BFCEMs) of Jamaican heritage, foregrounding their collective agency and resilience as they navigate power, positionality, and Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural (SPEC) mobility across transatlantic contexts, specifically the UK (Birmingham), USA (New York), and Jamaica. Centring the innovative framework of Transatlantic Diasporic Black Feminist Epistemology (TDBFE), the research integrates Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 2000), Womanism (Walker, 1983), Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), Hip Hop Feminism (Morgan, 1999), and Trap Feminism (Bowen, 2021) to disrupt monolithic and deficit-oriented narratives about Black women’s lives.

Employing original embodied Diaspora Embodied Praxis as methodology, including autoethnography, photo ethnography, reflexivity, and ethnomusicology, this thesis positions lived experience, cultural production, and sensory knowledge as legitimate, transformative analytics. The research demonstrates that BFCEMs use creative entrepreneurship not simply as a strategy of individual advancement, but as a radical, collective praxis for survival, resistance, and world-building. Empirical findings reveal that SPEC barriers, such as the motherhood penalty, racial bias, gendered adultification, and cultural misrecognition, operate both as constraints and as catalysts, driving BFCEMs to innovate new social and economic pathways through creative industries.

Black girlhood is theorised as a critical and autonomous phase, with adultification and systemic exclusion acting as triggers for later entrepreneurial resilience. Hip Hop and Dancehall cultures emerge as transnational platforms for identity negotiation, entrepreneurial practice, and legacy-building, while intergenerational entrepreneurship is shown to underpin family and community survival.

This thesis not only redefines BFCEMs as vital contributors to contemporary scholarship in Black Woman Studies, Black Girl Studies, and Black Motherhood Studies, but also advances embodied, decolonial research methodologies that centre affect, kinesthetics, and communal knowledge production. The findings illustrate how BFCEMs transform adversity into innovation, deploy creativity as a mode of resistance, and forge new legacies for Black women and families across the diaspora.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies (former - to 2024)
Depositing User:	Jennifer Whitaker
Date Deposited:	27 Jun 2025 10:25
Last Modified:	27 Jun 2025 10:26
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99747
DOI:

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