What to Do When the Streetlights Go Out: Jet Magazine as Archival Homeplace

• In Event: Imagining Liberatory Futures: Pedagogical Resistance in the Past, Present, and Future through Abolitionist Place-Based Methods

Abstract

Back in the day, Black press newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets would be sprawled and stacked in the common areas of everyday Black homes. hooks (1990) theorizes homeplace as a site of radical resistance: an intimate space where Black women create, nurture, and sustain educational freedom. Guided by Tanksley’s (2023) archival bricolage as a Black womanist intergenerational multimodal praxis, I examine how assembling archival fragments, speculative narratives, and computational metadata serve as acts of reparative storytelling and memory work. Centering Bunny, my maternal grandmother, Jet magazines triangulate speculative interpretations with local Baltimore archives and broader national narratives about Black girlhood and struggles for educational equity.
Participants will explore Black feminist archival bricolage as both theory and method, engaging archival analysis from my pilot study of 1964 Jet magazine spreads, participatory metadata practices, and digital scrollytelling pedagogies. This paper invites participants into Boylorn’s (2016) Blackgirl (no space) autoethnography to challenge and subvert the traditional mechanisms that uphold dominant racial and gendered gazes. Drawing from Brown’s (2009) and Hill’s (2016) transgressngroove as an onto-epistemological framework, this workshop expands the social locations and liminal spaces Blackgirls create in, through, and against archival and lived realities. Through hands-on activities involving archival collage and speculative map-making, participants will directly experience strategies to resist historical erasures, educational misrecognition, and dominant narratives of Black girlhood that persist into the present.
This segment resonates with the workshop’s broader goals by demonstrating how archival methods can embody liberatory praxis, intergenerational healing, and transformative pedagogy. Reclaiming and reimagining archival spaces today is an act of powerful imagination, resistance, and otherworld building for educational transformation.

Author

• Cortnie Belser, Graduate Center - CUNY