Sabotage and Anarchy: The Study of Power, Mourning, and Resistance in Black Girlhood

3 units

In this course, we will inquire, rupture, and cultivate an interdisciplinary understanding of Black girlhood in the context of the United States. We will theoretically build a grammar around how the coming-of-age experience of Black girls, starting in the 19th century, is central to how structural violence, exclusion, and neglect shape the lives of Black children. We will study age as a social construct within institutions of care, schooling, and incarceration. We will also consider the different creative mediums of knowledge production to elucidate themes of girlhood in poetry, nonfiction, social science, and creative memoir.