ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Black Girl Autopoetics Ashleigh Greene Wade explores how Black girls create representations of themselves in digital culture with the speed and flexibility enabled by smartphones. She analyzes the double bind Black girls face when creating content online: on one hand, their online activity makes them hypervisible, putting them at risk for cyberbullying, harassment, and other forms of violence; on the other hand, Black girls are rarely given credit for their digital inventiveness, rendering them invisible. Wade maps Black girls’ everyday digital practices, showing what their digital content reveals about their everyday experiences and how their digital production contributes to a broader archive of Black life. She coins the term Black girl autopoetics to describe how Black girls’ self-making creatively reinvents cultural products, spaces, and discourse in digital space. Using ethnographic research into the digital cultural production of adolescent Black girls throughout the United States, Wade draws a complex picture of how Black girls navigate contemporary reality, urging us to listen to Black girls’ experience and learn from their techniques of survival.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ashleigh Greene Wade is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia.

REVIEWS

“With Black Girl Autopoetics Ashleigh Greene Wade gives us a mechanism to witness the creativity embedded in Black girls’ survival strategies and digital social lives. She brilliantly readjusts our framework to focus on Black girlhood as a site of digital exploration, innovation, and creativity. Black girls teach us how to play with the digital through an interrogation of visibility, spatiality, activism, and self-presentation. This is a must-read for anyone invested in reimagining our digital future.”

-- Catherine Knight Steele, author of Digital Black Feminism

“Black Girl Autopoetics is incredibly important for Black girlhood studies; it will be the go-to book on Black girls’ digital expression. As Ashleigh Greene Wade points out, the dominant paradigm of Black girls’ use of digital media is too often enveloped in panic and mania. Here, she helps us understand how Black girls use media to navigate structures of oppression as they engage their imaginations. Black Girl Autopoetics will help create more life-affirming possibilities for Black girls to be in and move through the world with full access to their creative energies.”

-- Ruth Nicole Brown, author of Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.