Corinne T. Field (editor) - The Global History of Black Girlhood

EDITED BY

Corinne T. Field and
LaKisha Michelle Simmons

Publication of this book was supported by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality, University of Virginia.

2022 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved

Cataloging data available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 9780252044625 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780252086694 (paperback)
ISBN 9780252053634 (ebook)

For Black girls

At a roundtable we put together in 2015, The History of Black Girlhood: Recent Innovations and Future Directions, Abosede George, author of Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in 20th Century Colonial Lagos, pointed to the various ways in which blackness operated in different locales, and asked if the frameworks for Black girls studies could be applied throughout the globe. In a published version of our roundtable, George wrote, In colonial Lagos, which was neither a settler society nor a post-plantation society, racial difference or the blackness of black girlhood was somewhat secondary to gender, generational, and class differencesBlack girlhood in more racially differentiated spaces would be articulated quite differently. In all contexts, a central starting point could be to denaturalize the categories of black, girl, and girlhood so as to trace or historicize the mechanisms by which these social constructs become assigned particular meanings and become assigned to certain bodies. George's words became our primary inspiration for thinking more deeply about what a global history of Black girlhood might look like.

Inspired by this question, we organized the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference, held at the University of Virginia, March 17 and 18, 2017, which became the impetus for this book. We would like to thank the programs, departments, and individuals at the University of Virginia who provided funding for that event, including the Page Barbour Fund, the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, and Clay Endowment for the Humanities, and the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality among others, as well as at Harvard University, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Radcliffe Institute also generously funded the editors further collaboration as they drafted the introduction to this volume. At the University of Michigan, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Center for the Education of Women+, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Women's and Gender Studies Department, and the Penny W. STAMPS School of Art and Design supported the Narrating Black Girls Lives Conference, February 26, 2019. Thanks to participants, especially Saidiya Hartman, for opening up new possibilities for understanding the history of Black girlhood.

Other conferences that fundamentally shaped our thinking included the Black Girl Movement Conference, planned by Farah Jasmine Griffin, Camille Brown, Aimee Meredith Cox, Kyra Guant, Carla Shedd, Cidra Sebastien, Joanne Smith, Salamishah Tillet, and Scheherazade Tillet, held at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University, April 79, 2016; Know Her Truths: Advancing Justice for Women and Girls of Color Conference, April 29, 2016, sponsored by the Collaborative to Advance Equity Through Research and held at the Anna Julia Cooper Center, Wake Forest University; and On/By Black Women/Girls: A Symposium, organized by Oneka LaBennett through the Minority, Indigenous, and Third World Studies Research Group at Cornell University, April 2122, 2017.

This project would not have been possible without the many participants in the Global History of Black Girlhood Research Network who encouraged, guided, and contributed to this research, including but not limited to Abosede George, Renee Sentilles, Marcia Chatelain, Rhian Keyse, Tammy Owens, Kyra Gaunt, Laura Lovett, Katherine Sanchez-Eppler, Robin Bernstein, Catherine Jones, Anette Joseph-Gabriel, Kelly Duke Bryant, Emily Bridger, Alexandria Smith, Corrie Decker, Kai M. Green, Sonya Donaldson, Nicole Burrowes, Michele Mitchell, Oneka LaBennet, Lynn M. Thomas, Habiba Ibrahim, Wilma King, Colleen Vasconcellos, Ashleigh Wade, and Aria Halliday. Thank you to Lisa Wolfork and Tayari Jones. A special thank you to Tanisha Ford, Reighan Gillam, and Casidy Campbell, whose work has inspired our reading of key moments of Black girlhood.

Kathryn Vaggalis and Jennifer F. Hamer invited a special issue of Women, Gender, and Families of Color on Black girlhood and kinship. Undergraduate students at both the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia participated in a jointly coordinated seminar on the Global History of Black Girlhood, and we thank them for their energy, insights, and creative collaboration. Students also had an opportunity to curate a 2017 exhibition on The Sounds and Silences of Black Girlhood at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, and we thank the students and the library staff, especially Molly Schwartzburg and Holly Robertson.

We want to thank Zulaikha Patel and Reabetswe Mabilo for their photographs and the inspiration of their activism. We also thank Jana E. Bonsu, Beverley Palesa Ditsie, Phindile Kunene, and Denise Oliver-Velez for sharing their stories with us. Special thanks to Tiffany Ball for copy editing the manuscript and Venessa Nielson for transcribing the panel discussion. We are grateful to the team at University of Illinois Press, especially Dawn Durante for encouraging the project at an early stage; Allison Syring Bassford, Dominque Moore, and Ellie Hinton for seeing the volume into print; and the two anonymous reviewers for their formative suggestions.

Thank you, Layla Young, for being the beautiful Black girl you are.

As always, we thank our families and friends for their love and support.

. Corinne T. Field, Tammy-Charelle Owens, Marcia Chatelain, LaKisha Simmons, Abosede George, and Rhian Keyse, The History of Black Girlhood: Recent Innovations and Future Directions, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, no, 3 (Fall 2016), 396.

Looking for Black Girls in History

CORINNE T. FIELD AND LAKISHA MICHELLE SIMMONS

In 2016, images of teenaged Black girls with huge afros, braids, and locs, circulated on social media under the hashtag #StopRacismAtPretoriaGirlsHigh. More than one hundred South African girls protested their school's institutionalized racism, which they saw manifested in the school's ban on natural hairstyles. With the slogan, Fists Up, Fros Out! girls took to the street on August 26, 2016. A day later, they were threatened with arrests. This school protest, led by girls and informed by their concerns, represents an important moment in Black history. Often, scholars and students alike do not think of children as significant historical actors. The purpose of this book is to help us think about history from Black girls perspectives. How do we find stories that help us understand Black girls lives? What type of source materials do girls leave behind, teaching us about how they saw the world? The South African students at Pretoria High School for Girls produced primary source documents for us to think about Black girls lives and struggles at school. From social media posts to posters made at marches, and interviews with reporters, the girls words will be forever remembered. Historians can use these sources to reconstruct and tell stories about the past.