Wade, Ashleigh / Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice

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

Black Girl Autopoetics maps the everyday digital practices Black girls, showing us what their digital content reveals about their everyday experiences and how their digital production contributes to a broader archive of Black life. Ashleigh Greene Wade coins the term "Black girl autopoetics" as a way of describing how Black girls' self-making creatively reinvents cultural products, spaces, and discourse in digital space. By contrast to the pre-internet era, Black girls can seize the means of representation for themselves with a speed and flexibility enabled by smart phones. Throughout the book, Wade analyzes the double bind Black girls face when creating content on-line: on one hand, their online activity makes them hyper-visible, putting them at risk for cyberbullying, harassment, and other forms of violence, and on the other hand, Black girls are rarely given credit for their digital inventiveness, rendering them invisible. Using ethnographic research into the digital cultural production of adolescent Black girls in Richmond, Virginia to illustrate Black girl autopoetics, Wade draws a complex picture of how Black girls navigate contemporary reality, and she urges us to listen to Black girls' experience and learn from their techniques of survival

9781478025603

Duke University Press

February 2024

Paperback

Wade, Ashleigh / Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice