Black Woman Insighting Future Vision: Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb as a Site of Liberatory Knowledge Production

Abstract

ABSTRACT Situating a poetry performance as a form of autoperformance, I analyze the first National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, Amanda Gorman’s 2021 Presidential inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, to discuss the poet’s subjectivity as a young Black woman who invites her audience to be active agents for social change and pursuers of positive peace. I position Gorman’s poem as a narrative, containing life-giving ideologies including Afrocentricity, Black Feminist Thought/Black Feminist Rhetoric, and Coalition Building, capable of calling her audience into being the protagonists to bring about a liberatory future that recognizes their individual agency as Americans.