BACKGROUND

In 1982, Black feminists Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith opened their groundbreaking work But Some of Us Are Brave with the bold declaration that insisted Black women not only existed positively in US culture, but also were worthy of having their own field of study in the academy. In the spirit of urgency, they presented a multidisciplinary anthology, the first of its kind, which offered readers essays on various aspects of Black women's lives, bibliographies, and syllabi. The pieces selected for the anthology were not meant to represent an exhaustive list or issue demands on how Black women's lives should be taught. Rather, the contributors envisioned that the text would begin and sustain a conversation inside the academy that would aid Black feminists’ efforts in the community to save Black women's lives. The collection intentionally provided Black women in the academy a bridge that allows them to move back and forth freely, inside and outside the institution, and speaks to and with scholars across a myriad of disciplines. Thirty years later, with the same spirit of urgency, here we are standing on the bridge with Black girls searching for ways to carve out space for them inside the academy.² As an “an act of political courage,”³ Black girlhood studies actualized as an important, necessary, and rich field of inquiry because Ruth Nicole Brown dared to believe not only that Black girls were worthy of our intellectual, artistic, and political labor, but also that they had something in turn to teach us—that they could, if we listened, change the world. Similarly, following the tradition of Black feminist movements and the germinal work of Brown's Black Girlhood Celebration,⁴ we insist that the field of Black girlhood studies, like the then-proposed field of Black women's studies, be interdisciplinary and accessible for those inside and outside of institutions of higher learning.

SIGNIFICANCE

It is timely to emphasize the need for interdisciplinarity and accessibility in the field of Black girlhood studies because we have recently witnessed a significant increase in scholarly and political interest in the historical and contemporary issues related to the unique experiences of Black girls. Notably, these efforts include the African American Policy Forum report, Black Girls Matter,⁵ essays on the need to address issues related to Black girls' racialized and gendered experiences in and outside of schooling contexts, academic texts and conferences, award shows, and popular media discourses (inclusive of hashtags, #BlackGirlsRocks, #BlackGirlMagic, etc.). Given these various interests in Black girls, Black girlhood, and Black girlhood studies, an interdisciplinary lens spanning theoretical and methodological boundaries is necessary. Further, because the complex and layered lives and experiences of Black girls demands innovative approaches, documentation, and analysis, the field of Black girlhood studies must also explore rich and varied ways of documenting and understanding the lived experiences of Black girls. Maintaining an expansive approach is particularly necessary as we go about further establishing the field of Black girlhood studies within an academic culture that breeds silos of academic excellence and seemingly impermeable disciplinary borders.

For many years prior to recent scholarly interest, scholars, activists, public intellectuals, and other advocates who have been committed to supporting Black girls inside and outside of the academy have completed substantial scholarship, creative works, films, music, and other cultural productions that constitute the foundation of Black girlhood studies. However, their body of work, as well as their names, are often omitted from scholarship on Black girlhood. Joyce A. Ladner, Rebecca Carroll, Kyra D. Gaunt, Ruth Nicole Brown, and countless others are overlooked as key and pioneering contributors to the new and growing field of Black girlhood studies.⁶ Here, our intention is not about tokenization, but rather about the principles of interdisciplinarity, creativity, and solidarity. As the aforementioned scholars of Black girlhood have shown, along with Black feminist proponents in Black women's studies, these principles guide an ethical practice and theory on the lives of Black girls and women. Therefore, it is timely to explain the importance of these principles as well as “speak” the names of those who have contributed to the field of Black girlhood studies long before saying “I study Black girlhood” was ever imaginable. Further, it is important to note that the “study of Black girlhood/Black girls,” is and should be a political relationship of being in community with and for Black girls.

THE AIM, SCOPE, AND SOURCES

We recognize that the invisibility of Black girls in dominant culture poses particular problems for studying Black girlhood. Although Black women and girls have always known and valued the period of Black girlhood—as evidenced by the many games, songs, dances, and other creative elements that constitute a material culture of Black girlhood—the concept of a “Black girl” and the period during which she is, in fact, experiencing Black girlhood has remained largely nondescript in US culture. Thus, individuals interested in the study of Black girls (who are largely presumed to be illegible at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age) or girlhood often face perpetual questions about how one goes about studying something perceived to be so abstract. To assist with the empirical, theoretical, and practical challenges one might face, we have selected sources that will provide some of the tools needed to identify, theorize, and explain the “work” of doing Black girlhood studies.

Our sources are divided into two sections. “Tools” provides a chronological list and annotations for some of the most influential works that directly investigate Black girls and their experiences or exemplify methodologies to do the work across many fields of study. “Generative Works” provides a bibliography of works (fiction and nonfiction, texts, articles, personal narratives, social movements, and organizations) that focus on Black girls or are related to Black girlhood. Alongside the tools to identify, theorize, and explain aspects that constitute Black girlhood or the distinctive realities of Black girls, the resources in the bibliography are meant to help both locate other sources and generate ideas for the types of empirical scholarship and cultural work that exists. Although the works in the bibliography may not be solely about Black girls, with the tools, you can creatively engage the sources to gently detangle Black girls’ unique experiences that are certainly woven throughout. It is important to note that it is not our intention to provide an exhaustive list of sources (as that would be impossible), but to provide a generative starting place that is interdisciplinary and accessible.

A NOTE ON ETHICS AND THE POLITICS OF CURATING AN “UNDISCIPLINED” ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

As activists and scholars of color, we recognize the dangers of the politics of citation that emerge when one chooses particular scholars or cultural workers as those who “define” a field or represent the interests of a particular group of marginalized people. After serious consideration and lengthy conversation amongst ourselves and other scholars, cultural workers, and activists, we (the authors) thought it was important to lay out the risks and dangers of such disciplining actions while also presenting what emerged from our conversations regarding the ethics of this work. Citational practices are, in and of themselves, political acts. They not only shape discursive realities (e.g., discourse of a field), but also have real material consequences (e.g., promotion and tenure denials, grant rejections, suppression of speaking/artists engagements, etc.) for scholars who come from and study marginalized communities. Wrestling with these ideas, and seeking not to replicate the same sort of (epistemic) violence we have experienced, an ethics for our intentional decisions to curate the collection of resources in this document arose.

We take seriously what it means to say “I study Black girlhood,” the relationship of care, service, reciprocity, generosity, and love it requires. For us, there is no field of Black girlhood studies without Black girls. As Dominique C. Hill urges, this means “the labor of Black Girlhood Studies and Blackgirl advocates is to engender work with Blackgirls, which claim, embody, and contribute to the infinite and even conflicting representations of Blackgirls.”⁷ To do so, we foreground the necessity of working with Black girls, and therefore being in relationship with them as co-creators of knowledge, co-witnesses of their genius, and co-conspirators of the radical acts of freedom they imagine and enact.

We have intentionally made style and format choices in the spirit of solidarity. Granted, annotated bibliographies rarely include an extensive bibliography. However, we wanted to put our politics of interdisciplinarity into practice and incorporate a wide range of knowledge-producing practices, especially those grounded in relationships with Black girls. More plainly, we chose to annotate some references to ensure that we could show how we, as scholars across several fields, have frequently used these sources in our work on Black girlhood. We have found these sources to be useful and common across all of our work despite our various disciplines and interests. The sources that are annotated have also been helpful in crafting a language and argument behind our need to focus and center Black girls and other Black bodies that may be pushed to the margins. Thus, although the bibliography is not exhaustive and may seem separate in terms of structure, the works listed here are all in conversation with one another and build the field of Black girlhood studies in connection with one another. Again, this is not to say that these works are the only ones that can be used or are more important than others. Rather, our intention is to say that these works have been accessible in our scholarship and activism with Black girls, and in turn, they offer accessible theories and methods for other scholars, activists, and community organizers.

In curating a collection of works by scholars, cultural workers, and activists, our feminist politics of solidarity require that we are transparent about our struggles and fears that we would perpetuate this new culture of Black girlhood studies that oftentimes excludes those who have labored on behalf of the liberation of Black girls. Despite being situated within institutions that require us to jettison our politics of solidarity in order to become an expert in a field of study, our work on behalf of Black girls is personal, political, and collective. Thus, we are in an incessant battle about how to be inclusive and expansive within spaces of domination and exclusion. How can we create spaces for the celebration of Black girls in places that we were not meant to survive, let alone speak?⁸ With our politics and motivations for collaboratively writing this essay in mind, we encourage readers to use what we are doing here as a springboard to generate more bibliographies, more relationships, and more practices that center Black girls.

THE “TOOLS” (CHRONOLOGICAL ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY)

Ladner, Joyce A. Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.

“What is life like in the urban Black community for the “average” girl?”⁹ Though subtitled The Black Woman, Ladner's text was one of the earliest studies that provided a space for adolescent Black girls to share their ideas about their impending womanhood and unique experiences in urban cities. Tomorrow's Tomorrow is pioneering in its centering of Black girls as knowledge producers and the author's conscious choice both to acknowledge her political investments as a Black woman studying Black girls and to jettison the deviant perspective that was frequently used to examine aspects of Black communities in social science research. Ladner spent nearly four years interviewing and observing Black girls and their parents living in low-income housing in St. Louis, MO. Using mostly open-ended interview approaches to gather life histories and attitudes about becoming a Black woman in the United States, Ladner maps the racial and class differences that catapult some girls into womanhood prematurely and the sociohistorical factors that have facilitated Black girls’ “positive and practical way[s] of dealing and coping with the world.”¹⁰ Ladner's text is an invaluable archetype for individuals exploring the lives of Black girls in urban cities, and who, like the author, refuse to divorce their personal and political investments in the survival of Black girls from their role as researcher.

Carroll, Rebecca. Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997.

From the critical standpoints of 15 young Black girls (aged 11–20) across the United States, Carroll examines a range of issues including, but not limited to: race, colorism, misogyny in hip-hop culture, class, the politics of Black hair, police harassment, and homophobia in Black communities. With the frequent silencing of Black girls in mind, Carroll reiterates the centrality of Black vernacular in the creative ways that Black culture articulates their experiences, and thus presents the voices of Black girls “unfiltered” and “in the raw” by using first-person narratives throughout the text. Further, Carroll's approach to capturing Black girls’ voices facilitates revealing key aspects about each of the girls’ personalities and the tones they employ to address their imagined audience. One gets the sense early in the text that the girls imagine their audiences: former teachers, parents, and dominant culture, or those who may have been too quick to dismiss or silence their insights on the many worlds they navigate daily as Black girls. Carroll's text is critical in its biographical narrative approach to centering Black girls as autonomous subjects within qualitative research and demonstrating that what Black girls say is just as important as the distinctive ways they say what they say.

Gaunt, Kyra D. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Gaunt takes seriously Black girls’ “play” and the songs that come to represent the soundtracks of their girlhoods. Specifically, she opens up a space to study Black girls as cultural producers and critically investigates the games they create during their girlhoods as sites where we make sense of defining aspects of Black culture, especially Black musical production. Using ethnography to examine the experiences of Black girls and women whose girlhoods were spent in the northern, southern, and eastern states of the United States, Gaunt argues that in the performance of musical games—hand-clapping, foot-stomping, body-patting, call-and-response, double-dutch, songs, chants, and cheers—Black girls contribute to Black music while also learning an “an embodied discourse of Black musical expression [and] discourse about appropriate and transgressive gender and racial roles (for both girls and boys) in African American communities.”¹¹ Gaunt's groundbreaking text is useful to scholars interested in studying Black girls’ musical production and the “embodied practice[s]” that constitute their girlhoods.¹²

Brown, Ruth Nicole. Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.

Brown furthers Ladner's work by positioning Black girls on the other side of deviance, and Carroll's work by writing about what it means to do work with Black girls as Black women in a way that celebrates all of what it means to be a Black girl. Brown defines Black girlhood as “the representations, memories, and lived experiences of being and becoming in a body marked as youthful, Black, and female that is not dependent on age, physical maturity, or any essential category of identity.”¹³ In the tradition of Black feminists, Brown writes about her collective and celebratory practice of Black girlhood through the context of Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a creative political space created by Black girls and women in community with one another with the goal of “facilitat[ing] collective action, and then [organizing] that space so the girl with so much to say can say it, the girl with nothing to say can dance it, and the girl who wants to say it, but cannot write, will learn.”¹⁴ Furthermore, Black girlhood is offered as an organizing construct for theorizing the experiences and artistic contributions of Black girls via hip-hop feminist pedagogy.

Winn, Maisha T. Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. New York: Teachers College Press, 2011.

Winn presents how performance can be used to improve and mediate the freedom of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls. This exploration of performance is done in the context of Girl Time, a theater program for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls in the urban southeast of the United States.¹⁵ For Winn, playwriting and performance “embodies the need to listen to girls who have found themselves entangled in the juvenile justice system by inviting them to revisit, and in some cases rewrite, scenes from their lives, as well as the lives of their peers.”¹⁶ In this way, Winn uses the experiences of girls who have encountered the prison system as a testament to survival and to complicate their interactions with literacy. Winn and the Girl Time program also complicate the often misused and misunderstood notion of “voice.” She notes that literacy research has helped educators think of voice in more nuanced ways and “rather than needing ‘voice,’ most youth need a space and opportunity, and engaged audience so they can share their voice.”¹⁷ The performances of Girl Time showcase the girls’ ways of knowing and experiences, and the girls are also able to use the performances as moments of sharing and survival.

Brown, Ruth Nicole, and Chamara Jewel Kwakye, eds. Wish to Live: Hip-Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

This interdisciplinary reader combines art, performance, poetry, document analysis, autobiography, and cultural critique to engage hip-hop feminism as a framework for articulating relationships among Black girls, youth activism, and hip-hop culture. The authors theorize their connections to Black girlhood through hip-hop feminism as a political imaginary informed by social justice efforts focused on the creative productions of Black women and girls. This text interrogates the production, consumption, and analysis of Black girlhood experiences through practices of hip-hop feminism by way of themes such as sexuality, care, freedom, creativity, collective practices, and community organizing. Each chapter offers an analysis of culture, power, and the lived experiences of Black girls through an active engagement with art and activism.

Love, Bettina L. Hip Hop's Li'l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

Set at a local community center in Atlanta, GA, Love's year-long ethnographic study seeks to understand how six African American teenage girls ages 13 to 17 “conceptualize rap music through the lens of rap videos, lyrics, and societal beliefs that stem from the majority.”¹⁸ Using Black feminism, lesbianism, and hip-hop feminism as conceptual lenses and ethnographic methods such as observations, semi-structured and group interviews, Love analyzes her data to answer the following questions:

1. How do girls understand the images presented in rap music and rap videos?

2. How do rap's messages contribute to the girls’ construction of racial and gender identities?

3. How does rap music shape the girls’ lived experience?

Love found that after watching popular music videos, the girls believed that Black women were inferior to white women and situated this conclusion in the idea of choice: The respective women chose the professions that represented them in ways that are “bad” (read video vixen) or “good” (read professional). Additionally, Love includes the ways the girls resisted the images they received through hip-hop, particularly those of Black men. She concludes by offering hip-hop pedagogy as a tool that can assist Black girls in reading the messages they receive in and from hip-hop.

Brown, Ruth Nicole. Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Brown theorizes Black girlhood as freedom by analyzing different forms of archetypal evidence—a theatrical play, memories, photography, narrative, interviews, literary text, ethnographic field notes, an anti-narrative photo-poem, poetry, and original music produced in SOLHOT—to demonstrate the value of recognizing the intellectual contributions and knowledge produced in and through the creativity of Black girls. Here, Brown is even clearer that Black girlhood is a politic that, while it points to Black girls, can be used to draw our attention and efforts beyond those who “identify and are identified as Black girls.”¹⁹ In the tradition of feminist and womanist practices, this text offers usable truths that allow readers to re-imagine Black girlhood for the purpose of redirecting the conversations of Black girlhood from shame and blame to ones that pursue “new articulations.”²⁰ In addition to engaging creativity, Brown attends to sacred and spiritual work in its relationship to time and creating the space of Black girlhood through SOLHOT. Moreover, the creative potential of Black girlhood that is offered as a framework challenges and resists institutional norms, hegemony, oppression, surveillance, and capitalism, illuminating that society is so much greater when we listen to Black girls and build on what they know and how they show us what they know.

Wallace, Anya M. “Sour Apple Green: A Queer Memoir of Black Family.” Callaloo 37, no. 5 (2014): 1042–50.

Wallace introduces her essay by masterfully fusing her own narrative with the writing of Toni Morrison, who “tells multiple loves of Blackness story after story.”²¹ Wallace delivers a third-person narrative of her family, growing up in “The House,” and being raised primarily by women. Following Maria Lugones, Wallace uses her narrative to explore the love shared between Black women in an absolutely necessarily complicated fashion. As a reflection of her upbringing, Wallace gives insight to her queer family structure: in addition to being raised primarily by women, the women in her family were not married nor did they desire to be. Anchoring her personal narrative in feminist and queer theory, Wallace adds to the field of Black girlhood studies by providing a “womanist, feminist, queering telling” that she believes has been missing.²²

Cox, Aimee Meredith. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Cox is interested in the ways that Black girls' citizenship is understood by others and how Black girls enact and understand their citizenship within society. To investigate the ways in which Black girls find solutions, master concentration, recall, recontextualize ideas, and map out plans (shapeshifting), Cox uses ethnographic data collected from 2000 to 2008 at the Fresh Start Homeless Shelter for young women in Detroit, MI. Troubling how power and value interact with care for Black girls, Cox theorizes the lives and experiences of Black girls in relation to history and home, policy mandates and their limitations, youth-led protest organizing, sexuality and gender performance, and creative writing and performance as ways to engage community.

Lindsay-Dennis, LaShawnda. “Black Feminist–Womanist Research Paradigm: Toward a Culturally Relevant Research Model Focused on African American Girls.” Journal of Black Studies 46, no. 5 (2015): 506–20.

Lindsay-Dennis suggests that rather than using developmental theories that tend to be based on “middle-class White male norms,” the cultural lenses of Black feminist thought and womanism offer more appropriate perspectives from which to write about the experiences of Black girls.²³ She states: “these frameworks encourage incorporation of African American girls’ social location in the research process [and situate] their development, attitudes, and behaviors in a cultural context.”²⁴ Careful not to conflate the two theories, Lindsay-Dennis provides a chart that shows the similarities and differences of both and how they may be most useful in research. Lindsay-Dennis offers a model—Black Feminist–Womanist Research—that “allows for consideration of intersectionality and metaphysical aspects of African American girls’ cultural perspectives, and demonstrates a commitment to social change and community building.”²⁵

Simmons, LaKisha Michelle. Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Drawing from a mix of innovative sources such as oral histories, police reports, girls’ fiction writing, autobiographies, social workers’ reports, and school records, Simmons reconstructs the worlds of Black girls to understand how they shaped their unique identities as they came of age in segregated New Orleans, LA, from 1930 to 1954. Intersecting African American gender history and cultural studies, Simmons fills a noticeable gap in scholarship on the “gendered violence of segregation,” and its particular impact on the lives of Black girls who had to survive the racialized geographies of the Jim Crow South.²⁶ Simmons reveals the complex articulations of Black girls’ subjectivities across several class backgrounds and ages, and creates a space for their distinctive stories in the historical record. The stories of Black girlhood that Simmons presents show how Black girls negotiated their burgeoning womanhood in the liminal space they occupied between “racialized violence in the Jim Crow South and the social constraints imposed by the Black community.”²⁷ Simmons's interdisciplinary historical analysis of Black girlhood is particularly helpful for individuals interested in Black girls’ histories in the UnitedStates.