Black Girlhood Research Articles

Black Girlhood, Representation, Place, and Relationships in Jacqueline Woodson's Work

Black Girlhood, Representation, Place, and Relationships in Jacqueline Woodson's Work Krystal Howard (bio) In the concluding lines of "february 12, 1963," the poem that begins Jacqueline Woodson's National Book Award-winning memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming, she meditates on her experience growing up in different parts of the United States in the midst of the American civil rights movement: I am born in Ohio butthe stories of South Carolina already runlike riversthrough my veins. (2) The final lines of this poem speak not only to the importance of memory and storytelling as it relates to personal, familial, and national history, but also to the influence of other writers, such as Langston Hughes, on her body of work. In her author's note at the end of Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson explains: "And that's what this book is—my past, my people, my memories, my story" (323). Rooted in realism, much of Woodson's writing focuses on reflecting and magnifying marginalized voices by grappling with issues such as race, class, sexuality, immigration, teen pregnancy, and trauma. Here, I map Woodson's history and development as a writer, survey the significant thematic threads that are woven throughout her collected works, and discuss the ways in which her work magnifies Black girlhood through her varied depiction of voices and experiences. Click for larger view View full resolution Becoming a Brown Girl Dreaming Woodson is a celebrated and prolific writer. During the past thirty years, she has published over thirty works for young readers and adults and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2006 Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Poetry Foundation's 2015 [End Page 3] Young People's Poet Laureate, the 2018 Children's Literature Legacy Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the Library of Congress's 2018–19 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, and finally the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, among many others. Woodson has also been a four-time Coretta Scott King Award honoree and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner, a four-time Newbery Award honoree, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a National Book Award winner. Among Woodson's most celebrated works are her poetry, Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) and Locomotion (2010); novels for young readers, After Tupac and D Foster (2008) and Miracle's Boys (2000); and picturebooks, Each Kindness (2012), Show Way (2006), and The Other Side (2001). In addition to Locomotion and Brown Girl Dreaming, which take the form of narratives in verse, Woodson has also made use of poetry as a formal device in many of her works. In her own writing and interviews, she emphasizes the importance of African American poets (such as Hughes, Countee Cullen, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and Nick Flynn) and her elementary and high school teachers in igniting a passion for and understanding of poetry. On her website, Woodson explains how her various works contain and convey meaning as poetry, noting that Brown Girl Dreaming is "poetry as memoir," Locomotion is "poetry as fiction," The Other Side is "poetry as picture book," Show Way is "poetry as history," and Each Kindness is "poetry as empathy." Additionally, many of her works that are not written as poetry begin with an epigraph from a poem that influenced the content and title of the work, such as Feathers (2007), which includes as an epigraph the lines from Emily Dickinson's poem, "Hope is a thing with feathers / that perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without words / And never stops at all," and depicts its protagonist exploring the meaning of this poem, as well as If You Come Softly (1998), which takes its title from and includes an epigraph referencing lines from Audre Lorde's poem, "If you come softly / as the wind within the trees / You may hear what I hear / See what sorrow sees." This framing of poetry as a formal device, but also as a way to evoke emotion and thematic understanding, outlines a unique model for thinking about poetry's uses and value for young readers. In an interview with Stacey Lynn Brown, Woodson notes that "one...

Black Girls' Feistiness as Everyday Resistance in Toni Cade Bambara's: Gorilla, My Love

Black Girls' Feistiness as Everyday Resistance in Toni Cade Bambara'sGorilla, My Love Aria S. Halliday (bio) Black women's literature positions resistance as one of the most important aspects of a Blacka woman's experience.1 Writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde illuminate the connections between identity formation and resistance, especially in relation to patriarchal and heteronormative attitudes towards relationships and gender norms. For Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, resistance within mother/daughter relationships, as well as resistance to ancestral and community expectations, are at the center of Black female characters' experiences. Although included in Black literary constellations alongside Morrison and Walker, Toni Cade Bambara's shorter works have been anthologized without much criticism dedicated to her depictions of young Black women and resistance within the Black community. This article, then, focuses on Toni Cade Bambara's use of young Black girl protagonists as resistive characters who critique societal and intraracial issues in her short stories. Primarily, I feature Scout and Squeaky, two Black girl protagonists in Toni Cade Bambara's short stories "Gorilla, My Love" and "Raymond's Run." As girls who are assertive, willing to fight, and outspoken, Scout and Squeaky illustrate how communities and families infuse their girls with strategies to resist. Utilizing a Black feminist interpretation of James Scott's "everyday forms of resistance," I argue that Scout and Squeaky's feistiness is rooted in resistive [End Page 50] families and communities who reject normative aged, gendered, and racialized performances of girlhood.2 In doing so, I highlight how Bambara resituates feistiness as a necessary attribute created and secured in communities in the civil rights cultural moment of the 1960s and 1970s.3 This article contextualizes Black girls against traditional tropes of girls, challenging how Black girls have been made invisible because of their particular racialized experiences. I then turn to Bambara's characterizations of Squeaky and Scout to illustrate how "bad" Black girls cultivate feistiness as a survival skill. Lastly, I explore how feistiness could underlie "strong Black woman" stereotypes proliferated in popular culture that Black women confront daily. Despite their mischaracterizations, strength for Black girls is rooted in resistive communities and is necessary to promote the creativity, self-determination, and feistiness required of a world that constantly criminalizes and demonizes Black women and girls. Is She Really Bad? Racializing Bad Girl Tropes Previous scholarly work on Toni Cade Bambara has focused on her longer works, such as The Salt Eaters or three stories featured in the 1970 collection Gorilla, My Love: "The Lesson," "The Hammer Man," and "My Man Bovanne."4 Although Bambara has been anthologized as an author who centers African American culture and vernacular expression in her narratives, Nancy Hargrove implies that she is less often recognized as a young adult fiction writer like Twain, Joyce, and Salinger.5 Likewise, I have found that Bambara's writing has rarely been explored for her attention to Black girlhood. I contend, however, that Bambara positions girls as prominent actors in their communities. Set in the urban North, Gorilla, My Love contains fifteen short stories that explore Black families and love relationships. Many of Bambara's stories use a young girl protagonist or a representative character named Hazel. Although different in each narrative, Hazel, as a recurring character throughout the collection, provides literary continuity to feistiness as an important motif for Bambara. Moreover, Bambara's depictions of Black girlhood feistiness restructure normative conceptions of childhood because she resists simple characterizations of children as innocent or invisible. In traditional girlhood studies scholarship, the bad girl trope positions a girl who is angry, aggressive, and sexually active at the outskirts of society and community.6 Her isolation further fuels her anger, which incites her bad behavior. Marion Brown explains that white girls in literature who are considered aggressive or nonconformist are representatives of the bad girl trope—in addition to the sad girl who has low self-esteem and [End Page 51] strained relationships with women and the mad girl who adopts punk rock aesthetics and performativity to rebel—and are demonized for their "masculine" behaviors.7 However, these characterizations privilege narrow...

Reflections on Fifty Years of The Bluest Eye

Reflections on Fifty Years of The Bluest Eye Stephanie Li (bio) This year will mark fifty years since Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. In the past five decades, the cover of Morrison’s book has featured an array of pensive and melancholy black girls. They are often posed against shades of elusive sky or denim blue. The girls are always presented alone, completely detached from any community or connection to others. Often they wear hats as if to cover the hair that must be as hated as their dark skin and brown eyes. The collective effect of these images is to suggest that black girlhood is not just tragic, but profoundly solitary. For anyone familiar with the first edition of The Bluest Eye, these images are necessarily disappointing—too obvious to capture any of Morrison’s eloquence or wisdom. By contrast, the original publication cover contains no visual image at all. Instead it looks like the first page of the book, with the opening paragraphs of the novel printed in full. These paragraphs contain no reference to Pecola’s desire for blue eyes. Rather, Pecola is presented in relation to others. Claudia, the text’s narrator, laments with her sister the horror of Pecola’s pregnancy and stillborn baby. They mention her father, who impregnated Pecola in a desperate, profoundly misguided display of love. Moreover, their concern [End Page 682] with the marigolds that do not grow in their garden implicitly roots Pecola to the natural world. While the front cover of the first edition is filled only with words, the back is devoted entirely to an image. It features a black and white photograph of Morrison’s imposing face. Her portrait extends across the entire back of the book and just as Morrison’s name is not featured on the front jacket, only on the spine, her name is also absent on the back cover. By eliminating her name from the front and back of the book, Morrison reminds us that this text is less about her than about us. To this end, she looks evenly at the reader, eyes level and unsurprised. While Morrison’s large afro exceeds the frame of the photograph, it is her face that is most striking. Her closed lips do not smile, but she does not radiate anger or frustration. This is a woman who has never wanted blue eyes. Although she too is presented alone, she is the very opposite of the girls that populate contemporary covers of Morrison’s novel. The steady gaze that emanates from the book’s back cover implies a deep connection to others, if not to us, her readers, then to a community that has sustained and loved her. The original cover’s absence of a lone black girl reflecting on her tragic fate suggests one way that The Bluest Eye has evolved in our cultural imagination since its original publication. The book has come to signify most readily as a commentary on the idealization of white beauty and the self-hatred this perpetuates in the African American community. And certainly, Morrison’s book has much to say about the pernicious master narratives of beauty and race. But to accept that this is the most important insight of The Bluest Eye leads to dangerous claims that Pecola’s self-hatred is a thing of the past. The diversification of lines of Barbie dolls and other popular toys marketed for children has led some to contend that whiteness is no longer the uncontested standard of beauty. Now we have Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Lupita Nyong’o on the cover of Vogue. And briefly we had Sasha and Malia dolls named in honor of the Obama daughters before their mother rightly protested the commercialization of her children. With these images before her, might a Pecola Breedlove of the twenty-first century not pine for blue eyes at all? I’d like to suggest that this question elides a more central concern of the novel and its implications fifty years since its publication. Let’s return then to the original cover of The Bluest Eye, which has very little to...

No Disrespect: A Womanist Critique of Respectability Discourses in Extracurricular Programming for Black Girls

This article explores how extracurricular programs designed as interventions in the criminalization of Black girls may constrict their identities. Through a womanist theoretical framework, authors investigate the discourses about Black girlhood that permeate one extracurricular initiative which aims to counter the effects of exclusionary discipline practices on Black girls. The authors find that these discourses advance respectability politics, thus reinforcing an exclusive model of ideal Black girlhood as one aligned with White, Western, Judeo-Christian, patriarchal, heterosexist, and middle-class values. Authors conclude with suggestions for how extracurricular initiatives may develop programming and curricula that are inclusive of pluralized Black girlhoods.

Moon Girls and Mythical Beasts: Analyzing Race, Gender, and Monstrosity

Currently, one of Marvel Comics’ most successful titles is Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, written by Amy Reeder and Brandon Montclare. As adaptations of Jack Kirby’s original character creations, the titular characters, Moon Girl (Lunella Lafayette) and Devil Dinosaur, team up to fight crime. The comic’s success has been hailed as a win by those who argue for greater diversity and inclusivity in comics, and there is no doubt that Lunella and her story demonstrate positive changes in mainstream comics. For example, the character design and illustration of Lunella consistently shows her as a child, a somewhat unprecedented move in terms of representations of black girls, who are typically hypersexualized and drawn as miniature adults. Lunella’s precocious personality and scientific genius have been meaningful to black girls and women, as is evidenced in blogs by black women and in numerous instances of cosplay. However, it is also necessary to ask what challenges exist when monstrosity is paired with black girlhood. Comparing Lunella’s story with another narrative wherein black girlhood is linked to monstrosity, the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild, this article examines the productive nature of this linkage and poses critical questions about the ways in which white creators and audiences have traditionally produced and consumed representations of monstrous black girls.

Queering Black Girlhood at the Virginia Industrial School

AbstractThis essay argues that early twentieth-century reform schools for black girls in the United States educated children in heteronormativity to restrict their possibilities for entering the so...

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic

The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic

A History of the Resilience of Black Girls

Nazera Sadiq Wright. 2016. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.Black girls have a history of resilience. Nazera Sadiq Wright, in Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016), analyzes accounts of the experiences of black girls from what she refers to as “youthful” girlhood to the conscious or “prematurely knowing” (44) age of 18. Setting out to recover overlooked accounts of black girlhood during the nineteenth century, a tumultuous epoch of transition for the black community, Wright uses contemporaneous literary and visual texts such as black newspapers, novels, poetry, and journals to reconstruct this lost narrative. By engaging in a close reading of these texts, in which black people, emerging from slavery, communicated with each other about personal and community goals, Wright examines the ways in which the instruction of black girls operated in between the lines of literature to convey codes of conduct to the black community. She argues that with the emergence of literature written by and for black women, the role of the black girl morphed from docile homemaker to resilient heroine for herself and her people. In discussing this more complex role, Wright does not deny that black girls were vulnerable to multiple forms of violence and hurt, but does point to a more nuanced experience. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an intervention into the African American literary canon, filling in many of the gaps in the lost history of black girlhood, making it an essential text for those “who care” (22) about black girls as they engage in the process of rewriting and redeeming the narratives of an often-forgotten population.

Black Girl Thought in the Work of Ntozake Shange

In this article I examine the performances of black girlhood in two texts by Ntozake Shange—the choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf” (1977) and the novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982). The black girls whom Shange portrays navigate anti-black racism in their communities, domestic violence in their homes, and explore their connections with spirit worlds. In both these works, Shange stages black girls who make decisions based on their understanding of the spheres of influence that their race, gender, and age afford them in an anti-black patriarchal world dominated by adults. I draw, too, from Patricia Hill Collins’s work on feminist standpoint theory and black feminist thought to introduce the term black girl thought as a theoretical framework to offer insights into the complex lives of black girls who live in the post-civil rights era in the United States.

“Agent of Revolutionary Thought”: Bambara and Black Girlhood for a Poetics of Being and Becoming Human

In “Gorilla, My Love,” Toni Cade Bambara’s Black girl narrator reverses the traditional adult gaze on the child to disrupt our taken-for-granted notions of childhood, adulthood, and their relations. Read through the lens of Sylvia Wynter’s poetics of being and becoming human and Avery Gordon’s utopian margins, this story serves as a counter-narrative to that of the hegemonic child and inspires new narratives as part of enacting liberation. Through Hazel’s unruly resistance against capital, white supremacy, and patriarchy, Bambara recuperates the alterity of childhood in a way that reveals the joy and revolutionary transformation lurking in the present.

Blackgirl face: racialized and gendered performativity in mathematical contexts

While race, class, and gender are often treated as well-defined and static identities within mathematics education research, we explore gender, race and class as performances through the case of a middle school Black girl, Cameryn. Scenes from video artifacts are deconstructed using a hermeneutic process to reveal how Cameryn positions herself as a seemingly disinterested, resistant mathematics student through a facade we call blackgirl face. Blackgirl face not only reflects the particularities of Black girlhood for Cameryn but provides a new conceptual lens for understanding mathematics learning as a performance, requiring and enabling children to simultaneously negotiate race, class, and gender.

Introduction to Special Issue: Black Girlhood and Kinship

Research Article| April 01 2019 Introduction to Special Issue: Black Girlhood and Kinship Corinne T. Field; Corinne T. Field CORINNE T. FIELD is an associate professor in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Virginia and the Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is currently completing a monograph titled Grand Old Women and Modern Girls: Age, Race, and Power in the U.S. Women’s Rights Movement, 1870 to 1920 and co-editing (with LaKisha Simmons) an interdisciplinary anthology on the global history of black girlhood. She is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (2014) and co-editor (with Nicholas Syrett) of Age in America: Colonial Era to the Present (2015). Field is the co-founder of the History of Black Girlhood Network, an informal collaboration of scholars working to promote research into the historical experience of black girls. She was the co-organizer of the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference held at the University of Virginia, April 17–18, 2017. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google LaKisha Michelle Simmons LaKisha Michelle Simmons LAKISHA MICHELLE SIMMONS is an assistant professor of history and women’s studies at University of Michigan. She is the author of Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (2015), which won the SAWH Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for best book in Southern women’s history and received Honorable Mention for the ABWH Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award for the best book in African American women’s history. Simmons has written about black girlhood and historical method in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, about black college students and sexual cultures in the 1930s for Gender and History, and on Southern black girl writers in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is currently working on a book about black motherhood and histories of love and loss. Her essay “Pull the Sorrow from between My Legs” in the edited collection The Lemonade Reader (2019) explores Beyoncé’s Lemonade as a meditation on miscarriage and child loss. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Women, Gender, and Families of Color (2019) 7 (1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.5406/womgenfamcol.7.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Corinne T. Field, LaKisha Michelle Simmons; Introduction to Special Issue: Black Girlhood and Kinship. Women, Gender, and Families of Color 1 January 2019; 7 (1): 1–11. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/womgenfamcol.7.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressWomen, Gender, and Families of Color Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

“How does it feel to be a problem?” Black German Girlhood and the Historical Entanglements of Nation

AbstractIn this comparative reading of Doris McMillon’s Mixed Blessing and Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Invisible Woman, I examine the ways that the authors use the autobiographical form to engage notions of black girlhood in both Germany and the United States. By focusing on their fractured family relationships—and their desire for a return to family, race, and nation—the authors reveal the ways in which national and transnational discourses demarcate the boundaries of racial and national belonging. The narratives return us to scenes of fraught personal and national histories to articulate experiences of subject-making that echo transnationally, while making visible the black girl’s body as a pivotal site of nation-state transformation.

Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography

AbstractWritten at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well‐documented in the literature. Using flesh (Spillers ) as a hermeneutic to understand Black embodiment in the late liberal US, the essay centers on two young women who are targeted for school push out. Ultimately, the self‐making strategies employed by young Black women in San Francisco flummox the progressive political project and model “Black girl ordinary” as a practice of ethical refusal, both within and beyond the academy.

The Role of Leisure in the Dehumanization of Black Girlhood: Egypt’s story

ABSTRACT With recent reports highlighting the dehumanization of Black girls, the authors attempt to deconstruct the relationship between the racialized gendered oppression they experience and their use of leisure to practice and perform resistance and agency using narrative ethnography. The reality of oppression in the lives of Black girls shows the complex ways dehumanization becomes part of the Black girlhood experience. As we look into the role of leisure within the complexities of Black girlhood, our epistemological views inform our understanding of how Black girls navigate, endure, and resist against multiple systems of oppression. Using Black feminist theory as a guide, this research study examined how one Black girl, Egypt, adopted the use of performance art to practice resistance and agency. The authors hope that future research will consider the oppression, agency, and resistance that exist within the lives of Black girls.

Uncovering Black Girlhood(s): Black Girl Pleasures as Anti-respectability Methodology

Uncovering Black Girlhood(s):Black Girl Pleasures as Anti-respectability Methodology Porshé R. Garner (bio), Dominique C. Hill (bio), Jessica L. Robinson (bio), and Durell M. Callier (bio) Black girlhood is a site of pleasure, often overlooked, yet visible to those committed to allowing Black girls to just be. It is through our varied work and training in Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) that we, the authors, are reminded and understand Black girls to be creators and innovators working from pleasure.1 Envisioned by Ruth Nicole Brown, SOLHOT, an intentional and intergenerational practice of Black girlhood celebration, creates space for middle-school-aged Black girls to be teachers and collaborators of freedom practices, presence, and what it requires to hold space and the weight of brilliance. Knowing how to create and hold space for Black girls is important because too often Black girls are not allowed to show up whole and with a self-awareness that magnifies their genius and ingenuity. The creation of space for Black girlhood in our research and practice necessitates an anti-respectability methodology rooted in centering Black girlhood pleasures that centers the ways we are in community with each other and what manifests from the community we create. Pleasure, as we know it to be experienced and expressed through our organizing work with SOLHOT, is produced when we dismantle systems of power that seek to infringe on our ability to be our whole selves. Black girlhood pleasure as a method of anti-respectability, then, must move us away from dominant desires to only know Black girls through deficit frames or to name Black girls' vulnerabilities due to their social locations within a society that has never cared for or about Black girls. To do so, we argue, requires a rootedness in Black girls' aesthetics of love, reliability, funk, and performance. Arriving at this mode of anti-respectability methodology required individual and collective unlearning that allowed us to hear Black girls differently. And it is through our listening to Black girls differently and generating theory and praxis based on who Black girls say they are that we have moved away from dominant and [End Page 191] simplistic ways of hearing and attempting to guide Black girls. In this essay we employ those listening practices to reverb what we know differently because of the community we have created with Black girls. Here, we do not claim to speak for all Black girls; rather, we speak to and about the Black girls we have worked with and what they have shared with us. We believe this understanding gives us and social justice advocates a starting point to better comprehend the material conditions for Black girls everywhere while attuning specifically to an often undertheorized population. To think of pleasure as inclusive of but not limited to sexuality, we turn to Jessica Robinson, who in Wish to Live: The Hip-Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader, asks a very important question: "Can we be for Black girls and against their sexuality?"2 Robinson pushes readers to consider sexuality through the lens of comprehensive education and not as demonized actions reserved for adults. We, those who love Black girls, are urged to consider that Black girls themselves have agency and possess the tools necessary to make decisions about their bodies. By understanding the autonomy that Black girls have over their bodies when they are equipped with comprehensive sex education that does not shame their bodies or situate them as receptacles for the pleasures of others, we are able to see Black girls and Black girlhood as whole and complete—emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. This is significant because it opens conversations that are typically closed off from Black girlhood or are often engaged in a way that polices the bodies and decisions of Black girls and views them as "bad," "immoral," or trauma-centered. Her work leads us far from conversations of respectability and challenges us to consider the ways that a more anti-respectability approach would allow Black girls to be central to their own experiences. Anti-respectability has been considered by fields such as Black studies3 and Black girlhood studies.4 When engaging anti-respectability as a methodology...

Pleasure Verses: A Five Element Set

Pleasure Verses:A Five Element Set Ruth Nicole Brown (bio) I offer five pleasure verses, which I define as nuanced expressions on a joypain continuum that emerge from collective work which SWINGS SLAPS and SUFFOCATES the status quo. These pleasure verses exemplify Midwestern erotic aesthetics of cold double negatives and I-will-show-you-how-I-heard-us pedagogies of impossibilities transformed by collective work that continually and continuously remakes Black girlhood through practice as praxis. These verses are a direct engagement with creative nonfiction, a pleasure of mine, and also an analytic of feeling Everywhere: worlds. Everywhere: Black girls.1 Wind chills: Below zeroBlack girlhood studies is hereand of us who have been workingfor years, decadessomehow always knowbefore the humanities and sciencesBlack girlhood, universethe unknown still greater than the knownSo there is absolutely no need toreplicate proliferateand say, I will always iron2 when she tries to give up one thing by letting them have it only to give up another there is love and failure which is not failure really only an overindulgent waitfor us creating this timewith a device that deschoolsso we can startwith what we thinklike maybe perhapsBlack girlhoodas flowerBlack girlhood divinityinquisitionsas purple [End Page 179] and every colorso much variation to be the blue & the red the green, the hot pink3 somebody let the yellow in4trauma is but one look & I think it's perfectly natural to look skyward.5 First: Future Real Conditional In Listening to Images, Tina Campt wrote, I remain committed to a Black feminist praxis of futurity and the grammar of the future real conditional. More specifically, I feel a deep accountability to the had to of this tense and the necessity of its (grammatically implied) "must." For I believe that the challenge of Black feminist futurity is the constant and perpetual need to remain committed to the political necessity of what will have had to happen, because it is tethered to a different kind of "must."6 The grammar of the future real conditional of knowing and remembering Black girlhood with Black girls and homegirls must sound like: organizing Black girlhood with Black girls and homegirls will have had to happen, for my belief in Black girlhood to be greater than my love for the institution and for me to act like I know deep satisfaction making music with Black girls and homegirls will have had to happen, for our Black girl freedom songs to peer mediate, remind us who we are when we've forgotten, and of course instigate love and new groups, duos, and relations animating everything but the "I, expert" Black Girl Genius Week will have had to happen, for all of our sake, so it can't be that same old; dusty respectable song of etiquette and reform nor the equally worn out "only I know it theory of relativity" that leaves grandma unimpressed as Toni Cade Bambara narrated in "The Education of a Storyteller"7 remembering Kenneka Jenkins, Latasha Harlins, and Sakia Gunn will have had to happen, for Black girls present-alive, and looking back at us, to reappear and save their truths so we can carry them with us into the now [End Page 180] Dynamic Duos: Rest and CollaborationBlack girlsa complete audienceeven asevery categorization is missing somebodyi can't afford to cheapenwhile doing radical Black girlhoodreally those words tryand livebutabsolutely do knowwhatever kind of Black girlhoodi'm writing aboutthinking throughorganizing withI have been a pleasure: being8the audiencelooks very much like the same peoplewho made me possiblehere now and at firstglance, maybe that leap don't look big enoughare these anxieties valid?what would happen if that shadow work became public?plan tokeep those folks who grew me, with mewelcoming our circumstancesnow that it's allchanged and stayed the sameso that itoomay knowrestcollaboration annnnnnnnnddd so that homegirlstoomay knowrest andcollaboration BeCaussssssse there are Black girls who...

Ntozake Shange and a Literary Genealogy of Black Girlhood

Ntozake Shange and a Literary Genealogy of Black Girlhood

"Agent of Revolutionary Thought": Bambara and Black Girlhood for a Poetics of Being and Becoming Human

"Agent of Revolutionary Thought": Bambara and Black Girlhood for a Poetics of Being and Becoming Human