Moon Girl Magic: Black Youth Art and Musical Motivations via Graphic Novels and Pop Culture

• In Event: Hip Hop in the Margins: Hip Hop, Comics, and Critical Speculative Pedagogies

Abstract

As film and television adaptations of graphic novels like Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur maintain popular culture ubiquity, superhero narratives continue to have potential in today’s classroom. Superhero narratives, especially newer ones, can offer an entry point to move away from euro-centric curriculum and support student learning by bridging the everyday literacies students enact outside of classrooms with the literacies students are asked to develop in classrooms. Hip hop has influenced the multimodal storytelling of Black adolescence and Black literacies via music and graffiti art. This paper will explore the depictions of two pop culture visual narratives, the Spider-Verse films and Disney+'s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur graphic novels and television series. This paper employs Critical Race Content Analysis (Huber, Gonzalez, & Solórzano, 2020) to examine the diverse representations of literacy learning through hip-hop music and art for Black youth. This analysis illustrates how these experiences can be interpreted, coded, and comprehended across multiple texts, not just visually, but also through the music employed throughout the narratives. The characters in the texts depict the embodied ways of knowing for Black Youth that may be overlooked, oversexualized (if they are girls), or written as trauma narratives or one-dimensional/sidekick compared to their white counterparts. Questions considered during this analysis were:
How can possible readings/interpretations uphold positive identities or reinforce negative stereotypes? How can visual and audio texts highlight and provide insights into the Black experience?
What might it look like to bring those texts into the classroom to re-imagine curriculum instruction?
Findings from this analysis will indicate how these narratives depict feelings of being awkward, othered, or seen as weird, but those experiences can also offer opportunities for self-discovery, creative expression, and aid in the formation of unique, solidified identities. These specific texts can be used as tools to challenge stereotypical racial depictions and combat adultification bias by centering experiences, ideas, and concepts of Blackness that are often marginalized in mainstream. Representation matters in all media forms. By highlighting the visual representation of Black youth, we can reimagine, reshape, and re-story the colonizing literature we read and teach in schooling spaces and beyond. This study highlights the importance of understanding how integrating the remixing of hip-hop culture alongside superhero narratives can be pivotal to the adolescent journey of self-definition and the search for community, both within and outside of school spaces.
This paper will also provide a curricular rationale for incorporating more visual and audio texts featuring Black youth to facilitate critical conversations centered on empathy, equity, and identity development. When used intentionally, these specific narratives can teach about social identities through English language arts learning points such as symbolism, characterization, societal issues, and youth empowerment. These graphic novels, young adult films, and shows can serve as mentor texts for students to construct their own identities, dreams, and agency, which can challenge socio-political inequities and injustices, challenge institutional expectations, build community, and assert their autonomy.

Author

• Christian M. Hines, Texas State University