An encounter with the divine: the extraordinary literacies of black girls and women in endarkened third spaces

Abstract

The concept of “spirit-murder“ reminds us that the violence Black girls and women suffer in academic spaces travels beyond the mental and emotional; it manifests on a spiritual level as well. Consequently, spiritual healing is a priority for Black girls and women to traverse the world whole and worthy. This paper intends to first, theorize endarkened third spaces, sites fashioned to enact healing through the Divine and resistance against White supremacy. We, then, explore a set of extraordinary literacies—cleansing, language making, and sister circles—that prepare these endarkened third spaces as transient sites of spiritual rejuvenation. To examine these extraordinary literacies, both authors investigate their respective spiritual practices in the context of their roles as students, educators, and researchers in communion with each other. The authors commit to a joint self-study, using the methods of educational journey mapping, unstructured interviews, and Archaeology of SelfTM to elicit insights from their histories and present. Second, this paper considers what these endarkened third spaces and extraordinary literacies offer Black girls and women attempting to thrive in various academic spaces. We contend that practicing these extraordinary literacies build an endarkened third space that operate as a site to re-imagining and re-conceptualizing of self as being communicative with the present, ancestral past, and the greater Divine, which thus free Black girls and women to heal from the harms of the world.