“Black girl thought in the work of Ntozake Shange” in Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12 (2), 32-47
In this article I examine the performances of black girlhood in two texts by Ntozake Shange—the choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf” (1977) and the novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982). The black girls whom Shange portrays navigate anti-black racism in their communities, domestic violence in their homes, and explore their connections with spirit worlds. In both these works, Shange stages black girls who make decisions based on their understanding of the spheres of influence that their race, gender, and age afford them in an anti-black patriarchal world dominated by adults. I draw, too, from Patricia Hill Collins’s work on feminist standpoint theory and black feminist thought to introduce the term black girl thought as a theoretical framework to offer insights into the complex lives of black girls who live in the post-civil rights era in the United States.
Naila Keleta-Mae is an Associate Professor in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. She is also an award-winning poet, playwright and recording artist.
Other publications from this author include:
- “Black Lives Matter Toronto Sit-In at PRIDE” in Until We’re Free: Black Lives Matter in Canada, 263-275. (2020)
- “relentless” in We Will Win: Blueprint for Black Liberation in Canada, 151-152 (2020)
- Fire Woman (2020)
- “Workshop Negative: Political Theatre in Zimbabwe in the 1980s” in Theatre Research International, 44 (3), 262-272 (2019)
- “Canadian Theatre Made for Black Women” in Theatre Research in Canada, 39 (1), 227-241 (2018)
- “A Beyoncé Feminist” in Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, 38 (1), 236-246 (2017)