Space Is the Place: Black Girls Making and Claiming Space in the Fantastic

• In Event: Sites Unseen: Reimagining Literacy Sites for Just and Equitable Futures

Abstract

Black girls have had limited opportunities to formally or informally write themselves into existence to subvert dominant depictions of who they are and what they want for the future. Many studies have focused solely on oppositional consciousness, as researchers assist Black girls in talking back to the stories written and told about them (Eggleston & Miranda, 2009; Gibson, 2016; Sutherland, 2005). hooks (1990) noted, however, that oppositional consciousness is insufficient; instead, Black people must partake in creative self-actualization. It is vital for Black girls to speak back to narratives written about them, but Black girls must also write the narratives for themselves. When Black girls write their own narratives, though, how do they (re)position themselves as agentic, making space for their stories in a society that often denies that their stories matter? Guided by positioning theory, this paper seeks to answer that question by asking: How do Black girls use Afrofuturism to narratively situate themselves into agentic positions?

Positioning theory focalizes how people use discourse to locate themselves and to create locations for others. Harre and Moghaddam (2003) define a position as “a cluster of rights and duties to perform certain actions with certain significance as acts, but which also may include prohibitions or denials of access to some of the local repertoire of meaningful acts” (p. 5-6). McVee (2011) adds that “positioning is a complex, multifaceted, dynamic construct related to the ways in which people construct self and other through discursive practices such as oral and written discourse, language use, and speech and other acts” (p. 4). In other words, people use various acts to claim, ascribe, and deny certain rights to themselves and to those around them.

In a 32-hour writing workshop, I worked with seven Black girls to construct speculative short stories. Over the course of the workshop, five girls wrote a short story that centered a social issue that was important to them. Issues included racism, sexism, classism, and family relationships. To better understand how each girl situated themselves as positioning agents, I analyzed two data sources out of the larger data corpus. Data included the girls’ short stories and the individual interviews conducted with each girl before, during, and after the writing of their story. Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the girls’ individual interviews and critical content analysis (Johnson, Mathis, & Short, 2017) of the girls’ short stories, I identified three prominent ways the girls used Afrofuturism to position themselves. They (1) created characters imbued with personality traits they did not feel powerful enough to assume; (2) created speculative plots in which they had the ability to engage in activism; and (3) created speculative settings in which they could metaphorically place themselves as leaders.

Black girls must write their own narratives, but if educational stakeholders consistently uplift realist/nonfiction writing, they may be limiting the ability of Black girls to dream and design. Afrofuturism, however, allows Black girls the space to create sites of agency in an oppressive, restricting world.

Author

• Stephanie R Toliver, University of Colorado - Boulder