Luminescent Threads and Kindred Dreams: Black Girls Using Afro-Futurism to Build a Womanist Imaginative

• In Event: Afro-Futurisum: Girls of Color Reenvisioning "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"

Abstract

Black girls have historically challenged their marginalization through social action, but their voices have often been muted in social justice conversations. Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was the first Black girl to challenge bus segregation in 1955, but her role in the Civil Rights movement was obscured, at the time, to make way for Rosa Parks (Adler, 2009). Tarika Lewis, a sixteen-year-old high school student, became the first young woman to gain entrance into the Black Panther Party in 1967, but her contributions to the movement went unnoticed for years, as many historical documents about the party focus on Black men (Robertson, 2016).

By consigning Black girls to the outskirts of activist movements, mainstream U.S. society has participated in the asphyxiation of their social and civic imaginations. This is a cause for concern because activism, imagination, and liberation are intricately intertwined. Imarisha (2015) noted “whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction” (p. 3). Brown (2014) also stated that imagination is an essential component in challenging and resisting the status quo. Additionally, hooks (2000) argued that “to be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality” (p. 110). That is, social justice can be created and explored through a combination of speculation and imagination, and without it, the structures that support oppression could be strengthened instead of challenged.

This paper centralizes how five Black girls in a writing collaborative used their social and civic imaginations. In a 32-hour summer writing collective, I worked with seven Black girls to write speculative stories, of which five chose to write science fiction/fantasy stories that could be subsumed under Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic in which Black authors create speculative texts that center Black characters in an effort to reclaim and recover the past, counter negative and elevate positive realities that exist in the present, and create new possibilities for the future. Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to analyze the girl’s short stories and individual interviewa, I found that each girl used their narratives to discuss modern and historical social justice issues (e.g., racism, segregation, hegemony, transphobia, and sexism) while also creating spaces for future activism.
In addition to commenting on social justice issues and future possibilities, the girls used their stories to center youth-led grassroots organizations, reject forced conformity, and nurture Black girl spirituality. These foci align with Phillips’ (2006) five tenets of womanism: (1) dedication to the anti-oppressionism and the liberation of all humankind; (2) the focus on grassroots activism; (3) the rejection of rigid ideologies; (4) the reconciliation of the human, environmental, and transcendental; (5) and the notion that social activism is guided by spirituality. By threading womanist ideals throughout their Afrofuturist stories, the girls created a reimagined aesthetic, a Womanist Imagination, one that centers Black girls’dreams, hopes, and fears. They established a method of using speculation and imagination to comment on the liberation of minoritized people, generally, and Black girls, specifically.

Author

• Stephanie R Toliver, University of Colorado - Boulder