Black Parade: Conceptualizing Black Adolescent Girls' Multimodal Renderings as Parades

• In Event: Reimagining Literacy and Language Education for Girls of Color

Abstract

The recent release of the song, “Black Parade,” by Beyonce Knowles-Carter coupled with our current global and national landscape of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement led the author to question the history of parades for Black folks in the United States (Abdullah, 2009; Grams, 2013; Stillman & Villmoare, 2010). The author, a Black woman literacy scholar and teacher educator, builds on the scholarship in African American parading and Black Girls’ Literacies by presenting parading as a metaphor to analyze a website created by nine Black adolescent girls. Specifically, she draws on multimodal analysis frameworks to understand the symbolic nature of the site and its components, as well as how the girls use it as a platform to speak to issues of racism, sexism, self-definition, and perhaps most importantly, joy and celebration. The young women in this study grapple with what it means to come of age in a society that devalues their existence and experiences. Through the use of their literacies, the girls write against liminal perceptions of their identities, (re)positioning themselves and their lives as worthy of celebration and themselves as experts of Black girlhood. In an effort to understand their Black Girl Parade, I pose the following research questions: (1) In what ways do parades inform our understandings of Black girls’ multimodal celebrations of self? (2)Across their website, entitled “Black Self Love,” how do Black adolescent girls author a multimodal celebration of Black girlhood?
The website in focus was created by the nine girls across fourteen 45 sessions from January 2019 through May 2019 during their school’s “family” time. In an effort to replicate the practice of gathering around a kitchen table, each time we met we fellowshiped over fruit, bagels, donuts, yogurt, and other breakfast foods as we read, wrote, and discussed ideas related to self-love and literacy, especially as they pertained to Black girlhood (Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, & Sealey-Ruiz, 2016). I drew on case study methodologies (Barone, 2011) to collect multimodal data obtained from a study conducted in 2020, including a website created by the girls; transcripts from focus group interviews; researcher fieldnotes. I employed a critical multimodal analysis framework to understand the girls’ website, both examining visual themes across the website (“Homepage” and “About”) and individual items on each page (Serafini, 2014; Co-Author & Author 5, 2020). This analysis revealed that Black adolescent girls through their multimodal literacies (1) publicly (re)define and celebrate Black girl identities by (2) referencing the past through symbols, specifically as it pertains to colorism and (3) challenging authoritative structures. The findings of this study have important implications as they invite us to envision a schooling experience for Black girls free of violent acts of physical, emotional, and academic policing (Morris, 2016), to think about the narratives and images we present to students in classrooms, and to elevate Black girls as knowledge makers, particularly in the curriculum writing process.

Author

• Autumn Adia Griffin