PUT SOME STANK ON IT: POLITICS & POLICIES of the Course

Unit I: THEORY CLAPBACK WITH RADICAL BLACK FEMINIST TRADITIONS

Unit II: BLACK GIRL FREEDOMS & INSTITU- TIONAL/ Plantation Logics

Unit III: HE HATE YOU GIVE”: WRITING/ RIGHTING BLACK GIRL FICTIONS

Unit IV: LACK GIRL FUTURES… HIP HOP FEMINISMS & AFRODIGITAL BLACK FEMINISMS

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#BlackGirlMagic:
@the Intersections of Literacies, Pedagogies & Black Feminisms

First coined as “Black Girls Are Magic” by Cashawn Thompson, the slogan #BlackGirlMagic stormed the scene less than a year after Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created #BlackLivesMatter. In this course, we will treat #BlackGirlMagic as a very specific temporal relationship to Black feminisms, digital Blackness, Black freedom movements, and 21st century (re)iterations of white supremacist and imperialist narratives.  We will challenge and move beyond the simplistic frames that have positioned (and thereby dismissed) #BlackGirlMagic (BGM) as merely a kind of beauty and visibility politics that must ultimately fail for only imaging “magical interventions” against racialized/sexualized violence.  ​​​​Instead, we will closely examine contemporary political and aesthetic movements in Black feminisms that have made BGM possible/legible:

• Activism and policy campaigns that challenge Black girls’ criminalization via schooling and policing regimes, like the notable work of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Monique Morris’s Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
• The increased attention to Hip Hop feminism and its ongoing challenges to traditionalist notions of Black feminisms and third wave feminisms
• Black girlhood studies and its new archival research of the past and present in relation to migration, justice, and work
• Research on Black girl literacies and Black feminist pedagogies as new categories of analysis for the meaning of reading, writing, and performance in and out of schools
• Current critiques of Black women scholars rooted in Black feminist and intersectional thought against the de-racializing/de-Black-womanizing impulses of scholarly work that rejects intersectionality for assemblage theory
• Black feminist digital vernaculars--- seen in projects like Kimberly Bryant’s “Black Girls Code,” Yaba Blay’s “Professional Black Girl” series, or Pauline Alexis Gumbs’s “Eternal Summer”--- that innovates on the most available technologies in order to push alternative sites of knowledge, cultural rhetorics, authoring, and textual production

We will treat our class as a new kind of maker-space where we will strategically position what Alexander Weheliye calls “racializing assemblages” alongside Black feminism’s “disavowed” yet stand-alone sustained reinvigoration of African American cultural theory as we follow “black cultural archives that typify different manifestations of enfleshment” (118).  Since the “sexualized ungendering of the Black subject” (Weheliye 108) has played a pivotal role in the making of modernity, we will reject any notion that our keen focus on Black women is unrelatable or irrelevant to any western geography and ask new questions of whitestream classrooms, literacies, digital theories, and rhetorical histories.

The
​Syllabus