AMST 6440

Black Girlhood Ethnographies

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

This graduate seminar recognizes the current critical moment in Black girlhood studies as a pivotal point for addressing questions related to coming of age in the African diaspora, Black feminism, and the analytical power of ethnography. Black girls are hypervisible, both as "at risk" and as cultural trendsetters, and simultaneously rendered invisible in public policy discourses. Yet, Black girls' social worlds reveal entrenched racialized and gendered inequalities, and form the basis for some of the most innovative work in the social sciences and the humanities. We will consider Black girlhood studies that fall within the ethnographic tradition, including Elizabeth Chin's Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (2001), Oneka LaBennett's She's Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (2011), and Aimee Meredith Cox's Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (2015), using these texts to examine Black girls' complex racialized, gendered, and age-based cultural realities. The course will also explore the transition from girlhood to womanhood, while surveying the borders of interdisciplinarity and what constitutes Black girlhood ethnography by considering historical approaches, films, and ethnographic novels. Other works covered will include Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), and Octavia Butler's Fledgling (2005).  While our primary focus will be on Black girlhood in the U.S. and the Caribbean, broader diasporic treatments such as Céline Sciamma's Girlhood/Bande de Filles (2014) will frame black girlhood in global contexts.

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