Ịmụta asụsụ Igbo, ịmụta ụwa Igbo: Researching Igbo spatial poetics through a diasporic epistemology of repair
Conference: The 23rd Annual International Conference of the Igbo Studies Association (ISA) (2026)
Presenter(s): Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye, PhD
Tags: Conference 2026
Abstract
This presentation advances diaspora repair as an epistemological framework for engaging Igbo heritage, language, and culture from my positionality as a US-born, second-generation Igbo diasporan, Igbo language learner, and Black Geographies researcher. I theorize diaspora repair as a mode of knowledge production: In response to my lived experience of cultural and linguistic gaps growing up outside of Igboland, I use the academic research process as a relational and ethical practice and opportunity for (re)connection. Within this framework, I approach Igbo culture not as a static inheritance but as a living, performative system of meanings that I enter through linguistic, embodied, and spiritual attunements. My research examines the spatial poetics of Igbo cultural traditions and spaces – masquerade, family compound, and square - by drawing on Igbo poetry, literary texts, performance footage, and interview conversations. I attend to how language, spirituality, and social life converge, producing cosmologically rich spatial practices and locations where ancestral presence, moral order, and communal belonging are continually negotiated. Within this research, I center my own diasporic process as an (intermediate-level) Igbo language and culture learner, and I situate my language acquisition as a crucial site of repair, through which I learn Igbo cosmological concepts, relational ethics, and modes of perception. Rather than positioning diaspora as cultural loss, this work frames diasporic return—intellectual, linguistic, and spiritual—as a generative site for engaging Igbo knowledge systems in contemporary contexts. In turn, I argue that my attention to Igbo poetics offers both a theoretical and practical model for understanding heritage as dynamic, relational, and spatially grounded. By foregrounding Indigenous and diaspora Igbo ways of knowing, this research contributes to Igbo Studies by articulating how heritage, language, and culture function as living epistemologies capable of sustaining reparative connections in our present.
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