First coined as “Black Girls are Magic” by Cashawn Thompson, the slogan #BlackGirlMagic proliferated a few months 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, public pedagogies related to 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 representational politics that must ultimately fail for only imagining “magical interventions” against racialized/sexualized violence. Instead, we will closely examine contemporary political and aesthetic conversations in Black feminisms that have made BGM possible/legible. The course has four themes:

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Theme
​One

This very first theme is an introduction of sorts.  It introduces the syllabus and corresponding website very closely.  It also sets up the framework for the ways that we will politicize gender, sexuality, race, Black feminisms, anti-Blackness, literacies, and pedagogies.  

Since we are all working in higher education, we will start by interrogating the western academy and university in its specific relationship to Black women and femmes. We will hug up to Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s work most closely here: first, in her essay, ”The Shape of My Impact” where we begin by situating the academy as a space that can be as hostile and predatory as any other.  Second, we will read Gumbs’s essay, “17th Floor: A Pedagogical Oracle from/with Audre Lorde” as a Black-Queer-Feminist-guided meditation on teaching/being in the academy. We will close this early, short unit with an in-class activity that looks to Black girls’ literacies and languages as a fugitive space.  Welcome to the Jump Off!  In the words of Lil Kim, circa 2003, “we gon do this like Big Poppa Was Here.” ​

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Theme Two

In THEME II, we do a theory clapback from Black feminist scholars like Tiffany King, Brittney Cooper, and Zakiyyah Jackson who argue against the de-racializing/anti-Black-femme impulses that reject intersectionality and Black feminisms for assemblage theory and posthumanism. We will take up ongoing challenges to traditionalist notions of feminism via Black queer feminist activism, Black women’s critiques of the academy, and Hip Hop Feminisms in texts like Unapologetic, How We Get Free, and Making All Black Lives Matter. 

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Theme Three

In THEME III, We traverse the spectrum of Black Girlhood Studies as a new category of analysis for the meanings of reading, writing, and schooling. We will look at activism and policy campaigns that challenge Black girls’ criminalization via schooling and policing regimes like the work of 

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Monique Morris’s Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. We will study research on Black girl literacies and Black feminist pedagogies from scholars like Ruth Nicole Brown and the Black Girls Literacies Collective, treating these as an archive of activist research in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and justice.

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Theme Four

In THEME IV, we tap the magic in Black Girl Magic by examining ongoing digital justice projects, comics, YA literature, and urban street fiction that center Black girls. We will look at Black feminist digital vernaculars--- from projects like Kimberly Bryant’s “Black Girls Code,” Yaba Blay’s “Professional Black Girl” series, Pauline Alexis Gumbs’s “Eternal Summer,” to the 

plethora of AfroNaturalistas reimagining beauty standards. We will look at these works as spaces that innovate on the most available technologies in order to push alternative sites of knowledge, racial rhetorics, authoring, and textual production. We will also study Black girl image-making in texts like Braveheart by Eve Ewing, Shuri by Nnedi Okorafor, and Bingo Love by Tee Franklin as well as YAL and urban fiction.

​We will treat our class as a kind of maker-space where we strategically position what Alexander Weheliye calls “racializing assemblages” alongside Black feminism’s “disavowed” yet stand-alone sustained reinvigoration of African American cultural theory. 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  and femmes is unrelatable or irrelevant to any western geography and thereby ask new questions of whitestream classrooms, literacies, digital/cultural theories, and rhetorical histories.

Defined by  graduate students at Texas Christian University in September 2019