Black Girl Magic: African American Women's Literature and Black Feminist Theory

“At nine, all I craved was to be ‘other’.”  –Patricia Smith

Black Girl Magic has gained much momentum in the last decade as an international social movement formed to “celebrate the beauty, power, and resilience of Black women.” However, the movement is also continuing the practice of participating in a dialogue that many African American women have invested in through fiction, poetry, and nonfiction over the last two hundred years.

Black Girl Magic poems are a budding genre that explores the struggles of black womanhood. They create self-portraits that affirm or produce new images of acceptance and celebration. Why, however, is this important to the literary cannon? How has history created situations where black women desire to be “other”? How do these literary self-portraits of black women strength the image of black women?

This one quarter program will explore contemporary texts, both critical and creative, that contribute to the African American women's literary canon. In this literary studies program, our exploration aims to identify the African American women’s literary tradition and see these texts within a scholarly framework. This program emphasizes how this body of literature contributes to the larger cannons of American literature and global women’s literature.

Program readings will include selections by: bell hooks, Dionne Brand, Tomi Adeyemi, Jennifer Nash, Toni Morrison, Brittney C. Cooper, Saidiya Hartman, Kathleen Collins, Mahogany L. Brown, Jesymn Ward, and others, as well as the acclaimed collection, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (2018).

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies: