Rituals of Black Girlhood: Sacred Portraits of Play

• Date: February 18, 2022
• Time: 10:00 am—11:30 am
• Location: Paul Robeson Gallery Workshop B

• Speakers

  • Loren S. Cahill, Assistant Professor – Smith College School of Social Work
  • Noor Jones-Bey
  • Dr. Blair Ebony Smith, Assistant Professor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and New York University Doctoral Candidate
  
  

• Moderator/s

  • Vashti DuBois, Founder/Executive Director of The Colored Girls Museum

Black Women and Girls are forever entangled in games of Black Girlhood. It is through these everyday rituals that Black girls are able to test out problem solving, limits and rules. We are to try on different things, different attitudes and different positions and also determine what it means to be cast in a particular way. Regardless of our age, the racialized and gendered experiences of our girlhood inform our improvisation of who we were, where we currently are, and what futures we believe are available to us. This is important to understand because the transnational conditions for Black Girls are both beautiful, complicated, nuanced, and fraught (Halliday, 2019; Gaunt, 2006; Toliver, 2019). There is overwhelming research, empirical evidence, and situated knowledge that posits that Black girls are chronically adultified, dehumanized, not viewed as innocent or allowed to make mistakes (Morris, 2019; Blake & Epstein, 2019; Perszyk et al, 2019; and González, 2018; Brown & Outley, 2019; Smith – Purviance, 2021). Subsequently, play is often denied, does not often feel available or is used against us. Despite the conditions that seek to stymie or stagnate us, Black girls of all ages have ritualized embodied play of all kinds. Ritual as expressed by Black girls is the medium through which we create sacred space for ourselves and creative potential (Brown, 2013). Through various sensory practices, Black girls of all ages are able to examine pain, trauma, and violence so that we can move to the celebration of our resilience, beauty, strength, and knowledge (Ife, 2017; Cox, 2015; Brown, 2009; Boylorn, 2012). We draw upon the radical imaginations (Hartman) of Black Diasporic women and girls to draw connective sinew between their everyday acts of play, pleasure, and curiosity amidst the pervasiveness of gender and race-based violence in public and private spaces in the wake of slavery (Morris, Shange, Cox, hooks, Sharpe). We center the intergenerational play experiences of Black Diasporic women and girls to (re)member and (re)claim our places, spaces, and bodies as sites of connection, power, liberation, and futurity. Our collective of artists, archivists, and academics that will be in conversation include Vashti DuBois, Founder/Executive Director of The Colored Girls Museum; Dr. Loren Cahill, Assistant Professor of Smith College School of Social Work, Dr. Blair Ebony Smith, Assistant Professor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and New York University Doctoral Candidate, Noor Jones-Bey. Each collective member will share how we create space to play with and gain greater access to embodied freedom through our artistry, research, and curation. Specifically, we will unpack transnational lessons of play inspired by living portraits of Black girls that we have worked with in Brooklyn, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Urbana-Champaign, IL; and Laventille Hill in Trinidad and Tobago. In this experiential learning forum, we will explore how play rituals provide opportunities to create sacred spaces and sanctuaries of our own. Ultimately, we hope to reflect and interrogate how portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2005) and play can be understood as a ritual through the genius of Black girls.