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After conducting further research on my primary source, The Deep by Rivers Solomon, I drafted my thesis below. I feel like my thesis may be too specific and I might not have strong enough secondary sources to support my thesis. However, I do plan to alter my thesis as I finish drafting my research paper as necessary.
Preliminary Thesis:
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In the context of cultural worldbuilding, identity is influenced by kin and the history rooted in one’s past as much as it is influenced by outside social factors.
Image from Books Beans and Botany
Identity in The Deep
Initially my plan was to explore how afrofuturism in the the novel furthered the ideas of worldbuilding, but then I scratched off this idea because it seemed too vague.
Then once I finished reading the novel at the beginning of the quarter, I made a few annotations and then forgot about the book for about two weeks. I think this break was very much needed because when I went back to read my older annotations--and even to re-read certain parts of the book, I began to notice how the main protagonist Yetu struggled a lot with her identity.
The excerpts above are two quotes from The Deep, pages 101 and 107, respectively, that demonstrate how Yetu longs to know who she is beyond her kin and her ancestry. This internal conflict that Yetu has is what ultimately drives the plot of the novel in Yetu running away from her community, to eventually returning back home and realizing that it isolating being without her kin, along with other realiziations.
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