Black Girl Play, Performance, and Activism

• Date: February 18, 2022
• Time: 2:00 pm—3:30 pm
• Location: Lecture Hall

• Speakers

  • Leah Gipson, Assistant Professor in the Art Theraphy and Counseling Department – School of the Art Institute of Chicago
  • Mimi Owusu, PhD Student – University of Michigan
  • Aja D. Reynolds, Assistant Professor in Teacher Education – Wayne State University
  
  

• Moderator/s

  • Porshé Garner, Senior Administrator – A Long Walk Home, Inc.

The proposed black girlhood & performance panel will present three black feminist perspectives on the interconnectedness between performance, play and activism. 

Exploring images of black girl beauty play, Leah Gipson will discuss black girlhood, archives of mourning, and memorials. As part of a collaborative participatory art project called the Black Girlhood Altar, Leah Gipson places Ma’Khia Bryant’s TikTok videos in the Altar to speak to spiritual and political themes of trauma and grief through metaphors of play and replay. Gipson used the TikTok videos to create a sidewalk memorial during an installation of the Altar. Ma’Khia appears wearing Disney princess and Rugrats t-shirts, set to rap music, while doing her hair in different styles and playing in front of the camera. Mourners encounter Ma’Khia through her looping images and sounds in contrast to a spectacle of her violent death and the replaying of police body cam footage. 

Mimi Owusu will use bell hooks’ “oppositional gaze,” theory (1992) as a framework for unpacking the ways that Black girls see and read one another on social media. This project specifically engages a group of Black women in conversation about the ways that Black girls participated in the “Up” dance challenge performed to Cardi B’s hit single, “Up.” A type of study within a study, this project not only explores Black girls’ ways of knowing, learning, and being through the performances being featured in the study, but also through the ways that Black women construct a gaze that renders Black girls’ brilliance more legible.

Aja D. Reynolds will discuss Taking Our Freedom: A Radical Reading of Black Girl Free and the politics of play as a site for radical imaginations to manifest not only for young people, but adults as well. Child/adolescent developmental theorists promote “play” as necessary engagement for children to develop linguistic, cognitive and social skills, as well as general personality development. Brown (2014) explores this concept drawing heavily on disciplines lodged in performance studies and her own research with Black girls to examine “play” in the form of Wreckless Theatrics. Brown conceptualizes “play” as a site for “opportunities to tell multiple truths of those typically unheard , and, when spoken out loud, and the act of telling feels a lot like freedom (36)”. Reynold’s discussion of play unpacks the complacency of schools in diminishing Black girlhood to observe the intentional work of a particular Black girl space in Chicago that provides a framework for restoring Black girlhood in youth-centered spaces.