ASRC 6440 - Black Girlhood Ethnographies

(crosslisted) AMST 6440, ANTHR 6444

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

O. LaBennett.

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 hyper-visible, 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.