Black Girls on the Verge

  • Date: February 17, 2022
  • Time: 3:30 pm—5:00 pm
  • Location: Lecture Hall
  • Speakers
  • Moderator/s

Innocent Play: Deborah Roberts and the Assemblage of the Black Girl

Kiana Murphy

In her piece titled “Unbothered,” visual artist Deborah Roberts, in her iconic style of collage, depicts a Black girl poised and determined to conjure her own protection. The two parts of her face—half showing dark brown skin and other half toned as a black and white photograph—are assembled in almost perfect adjacency, but the slight shift of her right eye compared to her left suggests a slight spatial imbalance, one eye peering forward and the other looking elsewhere. As her obscurely large left hand is raised, another open-palmed hand protrudes out of her hip, perhaps someone closely assembled to her. With no visual indication of legs, she appears as if she is floating in space, the protruding hand now recast as a possible magical incantation casting a collective shield around this vulnerable Black girl. Roberts uses a combination of collage, drawing, and painting to illustrate and examine the visual mechanics of how Black girls are imagined, depicting the often invisible ways Black girls and women are made vulnerable. This paper will examine Roberts’ collage work as creative retellings of the tenuous project of being and becoming that Black girls endure. Critically examining the disassembly of the conjoined terms Black, girl, and innocence that Robert’s collage work displays, I will also consider how this intentional yet disorderly mode of creativity also becomes a site of play that redirects the viewer’s gaze to the tender innocence of black childhood. In essence, Robert’s work animates what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” and Tina Campt calls a “grammar of black feminist futurity”: an assembled blueprint for survival that Black girls produce as they turn toward themselves and each other to share moments of intimate care and friendship and craft alternative worlds where they can fully be. 

“before she traded in all her girl”: African American Girl Subjects in African American Women’s Photography 1970-2003 

Destiny Crockett

How do we know when we are looking at an African American girl? What is made in our looking at the girls in the images Black women photographers capture? How do we read skin color, sartorial practice, gestures, and other characteristics and make a determination about the distinctiveness of African American girlhood based upon the way African American girls appear in images? 

This paper dwells in a reading of African American girls as in excess of what Robin Bernstein would call the racially innocent child, as womanish. I pay particular attention to gesture, fight, and shine to argue that while one of the ongoing discussions in Black Girlhood Studies laments African American girls’ lack of access to the perceived innocence associated with American childhood, African American girls instead have an opportunity to have a more honest self-possession. 

This paper’s theoretical basis is Nicole Fleetwood’s “excess flesh,” which is a strategy Black women cultural producers use that indexes the idea that Black women are too much (too sexy, too aggressive, too strong, too loud, too bold), or in excess of what they or any human should be, to index anti-Blackness and subvert the expectations for Black women (110). It pushes against the negative/positive representation bifurcation, though Fleetwood reads this strategy in visual art works that might, to an unyielding eye, be perceived as “negative” representation. Fleetwood focuses on women subjects, and I marry this frame with the African American colloquial term, womanish, that Alice Walker defined in her offering of womanist (xi). 

I am interested in photos from Carrie Mae Weems’s Ain’t Jokin Series (1987-1988), Kitchen Table Series (1990), and May Flowers Long Forgotten (2003), Toni Parks’s Twins photo (1988), and Latoya Ruby Frazier’s The Notions of Family (2004). In these photos, images of young girls allow us to ask what is considered “excess” in an image of a young girl. These images allow readings that do not seek to prove that the Black girl subjects are innocent or fit into American ideals of childhood—nor do the readings seek to prove that they are the opposites of these ideals. In the photos I analyze, Weems parodies, Parks reflects adornment, and Frazier documents. These artists sometimes capture the girls standing alone, and in other images, place African American girls alongside women, making them mirror one another. 

Music as Violence Against Black Girls Online: 

An Un-Sound Public Health Crisis and the Need for Ecological Gender Justice in Rap Music

Kyra Gaunt

When we search and discover new music on YouTube–the number one music discovery channel on the web and the number one destination for kids, we never think their play and our views are contributing to the sexual grooming and sexploitation of the most vulnerable and marginalized girls and their aspirational bedroom play. Tween twerking videos sit at the intersection of music monetization, search recommendations, and sexually-objectifying comments and disclosure tactics. This paper unpacks how very young girls turn up to music that is banking on their consent to patriarchal violence and anti-Black sexism in their YouTube play.  The “halo effects” (cf. Edward Thorndike 1920) between Black girls twerking videos and male creators rap videos (i.e., Soulja Boy’s “Donk”, Kystlis’s “Booty Hopscotch,” Sage the Gemini’s “Red Nose” and mega artist Juicy J’s “Scholarship”) allow music and tech companies to track, block, and monetize big data on the back of Black girls’ online play. Everyone but the girl profits from a matrix of domination that exponentially perpetuates misogynoir online and off.

Haitian Girls at Play: From Shadows to Wonn

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles

One of the early scenes of Raoul Peck’s second feature length film, L’homme sur les quais/ Man by the Shore (1993) presents a Haitian girl whose play is interrupted by authoritarian violence. After little Sarah witnesses a man being beaten by the Tonton Macoutes—the private police force of the notorious Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986)—her relationship to play is forever altered. As the film continues, we witness how play becomes a way for Sarah to exorcise the demons that haunt her in the aftermath of witnessing political violence. Sarah emblematizes how Haitian visual artists and cultural workers deploy the image of Haitian girls at play to confront what it means to be a girl growing up in a fraught political, social, or historic context. Similarly, Edwidge Danticat displays how this complexity plays out in the life of Amabelle Désir, the protagonist of the novel The Farming of Bones (1998) who grows up in the Dominican Republic under the rule of Trujillo who eventually orders the massacre of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in 1937. When Amabelle shares: “[as] a child, I used to spend hours playing with my shadow, something that my father warned could give me nightmares, nightmares like seeing voices twirl in a hurricane of rainbow colors and hearing the odd shapes of things rise up and speak to define themselves. Playing with my shadow made me, an only child, feel less alone” we understand that for her play is a form of survival. This paper examines how representations of Haitian girls at play in film and photography create narratives of girlhood have much to tell us about survival as they refuse to spectacularize their subjectivity and embrace the complexity of the context surrounding them. I focus on Shirley Bruno’s film Tezen (2016) and photography by FotoKonbit (2011-2017)  in order to explore how contemporary images of Haitian girls at play depart from earlier narratives of “play interrupted” or “impossible play.” Rather, these contemporary artists commit to showing Haitian girls at play because it is essential to their survival, freedom, and humanity. This refusal to deny the role of importance of play in the lives of Haitian girls stems from a Black feminist commitment to nuancing how we perceive race, gender, and class in the Haitian context.

Stillness is the Move: Generating Black Girl Interiority through Visual Technologies

Amoni Thompson

“Stillness is the Move: Generating Black Girl Interiority through Visual Technologies,” aims to think about the strategic practices’ Black women photographers use to construct visual narratives that reshape our understandings of Black interiority. It explores how Black women visual artists are attending to the ways Black girls negotiate subjectivity while crafting an existence that centers upon the liveliness of their inner worlds. This paper asserts that there are various forms of technologies available to generatively explore and express Black girl interiority. I explore these possibilities and methods through the work of Nydia Blas, Scheherazade Tillet, and Kennedi Carter who often use the optic of “sitting” to convey expressive moments of contemplation and deliberation. This work centers documentary portraits of Black girls and meditates on their use of gesture in order to form an archive of Black girl interiority. This chapter uses the visual evidence of Black women artists to investigate how we might adequately tend to Black girls’ world-making practices.


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