Full Description
In Black Girl Autopoetics Ashleigh Greene Wade explores how Black girls create representations of themselves in digital culture with the speed and flexibility enabled by smartphones. She analyzes the double bind Black girls face when creating content online: on one hand, their online activity makes them hypervisible, putting them at risk for cyberbullying, harassment, and other forms of violence; on the other hand, Black girls are rarely given credit for their digital inventiveness, rendering them invisible. Wade maps Black girls' everyday digital practices, showing what their digital content reveals about their everyday experiences and how their digital production contributes to a broader archive of Black life. She coins the term Black girl autopoetics to describe how Black girls' self-making creatively reinvents cultural products, spaces, and discourse in digital space. Using ethnographic research into the digital cultural production of adolescent Black girls throughout the United States, Wade draws a complex picture of how Black girls navigate contemporary reality, urging us to listen to Black girls' experience and learn from their techniques of survival.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Defining Black Girl Autopoetics 1
Interlude: On Developing Digital Ethics for/with Black Girls 19
1. Places to Be: Black Girls Mapping, Navigating, and Creating Spaces through Digital Practice 29
2. "You Gotta Show Your Life": Reading the Digital Archives of Everyday Black Girlhood 61
3. "I Love Posting Pictures of Myself": Hypervisibility as a Politics of Refusal 84
4. Making Time: Black Girls' Digital Activism as Temporal Reclamation 105
Conclusion: What Does Black Girl Autopoetics Make Possible? 127
Notes 133
Bibliography 147
Index 157
