Black Girl Time Travelers: Multimodal Practices for Making and Shaping Black Girl Temporalities in Dystopian Worlds

• In Event: Toward Critical Multimodality: Exploring Theory, Research, and Practice in Transformative Educational Spaces

Abstract

Through our session we seek to disrupt and resist the silencing of Black girls’ multimodal practices in traditional research and the broader U.S. social context. Specifically, we center Black girls’ multimodal, self-expressive practices to dismantle oppressive, eurocentric constructions of their ways of being and temporality by addressing the following question: How do Black girls use multimodal practices to time travel between their pasts, presents, and futures in a dystopian world?

The premise of our session is that Black girls are living in a harmful dystopian reality that must be interrupted now. Traditionally, the notion of dystopia refers to a future filled with immense suffering; however, this is the current condition for Black girls due to gendered antiblackness (Collins, 1991). Linear timelines fail Black girls by assigning the future as a fixed point which, “imposes limits on what could be by imposing a hyper analysis of what is” (Author 5-3, forthcoming). Thus, Black girls deserve opportunities to time travel through multimodal practices which amplify and honor their past histories and present realities in order to author their own futures. Here, we conceptualize Black girls’ time travel in a Black Feminist Futurities framework (Campt, 2014) layered with Black Girlhood theories (Brown, 2009, 2013) to elucidate how Black girls critically leverage their own multimodal practices for personal communication and meaning-making (New London Group, 1996). As such, Black girls use multimodal practices to enter into temporalities that are matriarchal, communal and nonlinear, allowing them to engage in self-expression, social critique, collective healing and futuremaking.
Based on findings from a thematic synthesis (Thomas & Harden, 2008), we highlight three key multimodal practices Black girls take up/enact to open possibilities to the past, present, and future:


(1) Popular multimedia practices, including films that center Black girls as techno-cultural creators, scientists, purveyors of knowledge and time-travelers, such as Black Panther (Coogler et al., 2018) and See You Yesterday (Bristol, Bailey, & Lee, 2019) and Black girls’ digital media making (Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2018);


(2) Visual art practices, including Black girls’ drawings/sketchings (Author 5-2, 2020a; Coles, 2019; Gholson & Robinson, 2019) and digital collaging (Author 5-2, 2020b, in press; Griffin, 2021; Muhammad & Womack, 2015);


(3) Embodied practices such as Black girls’ hairstyling (Phelps-Ward & Laura, 2016) and the making of material artifacts that can be worn such as masks and clothing (Author 5-1, 2019; Holbert et al., 2020).


Findings from our thematic synthesis suggests Black girls’ critical multimodal practices facilitate their ability to travel beyond the oppressive logics, temporalities, and realities of a white patriarchal capitalist dystopia, in order to re-claim their power and histories, re-center their lived experiences, and envision their futures on their own terms. Ultimately, we call for school, community, media and societal spaces that provide Black girls with opportunities to explore and create multimodal practices, honoring their lives and guiding them to realities of identity affirmation, safety, love and healing.

Authors

• Theda Gibbs Grey, Ohio University

• Jennifer Danridge Turner, University of Maryland - College Park

• Alexis Young, University of Maryland - College Park