“With <i>Black Girl Autopoetics</i> Ashleigh Greene Wade gives us a mechanism to witness the creativity embedded in Black girls’ survival strategies and digital social lives. She brilliantly readjusts our framework to focus on Black girlhood as a site of digital exploration, innovation, and creativity. Black girls teach us how to <i>play</i> with the digital through an interrogation of visibility, spatiality, activism, and self-presentation. This is a must-read for anyone invested in reimagining our digital future.” - Catherine Knight Steele, author of (Digital Black Feminism) “<i>Black Girl Autopoetics</i> is incredibly important for Black girlhood studies; it will be the go-to book on Black girls’ digital expression. As Ashleigh Greene Wade points out, the dominant paradigm of Black girls’ use of digital media is too often enveloped in panic and mania. Here, she helps us understand how Black girls use media to navigate structures of oppression as they engage their imaginations. <i>Black Girl Autopoetics</i> will help create more life-affirming possibilities for Black girls to be in and move through the world with full access to their creative energies.” - Ruth Nicole Brown, author of (Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood)
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