Abstract
In recent years, both the hashtag and the concept of #BlackGirlMagic have been promulgated in virtual and nonvirtual spaces, where the image can be seen emblazoned on hoodies, T-shirts, and mugs or discussed in academic and nonacademic spaces. Often, Black Girl Magic is the answer to an explicit or implicit question—“How do black girls, women, and femmes do it?”—“it” representing a number of things including the pursuit of their definitions of success, finding joy and laughter, mothering, and caring for each other in a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal world. In Black Girl Magic: Beyond the Hashtag, Julia Jordan-Zachary and Duchess Harris have curated chapters that work to contextualize, challenge, and theorize the concept of Black Girl Magic. In so doing, they attend to its inception within online spaces, where the hashtag #BlackGirlsAreMagic was originally coined by CaShawn Thomas and then further developed—and at times, commercialized—as #BlackGirlMagic (#BGM).
As Janell Hobson notes in the foreword, Black Girl Magic hints at the idea that “[t]he resistance of Black women and girls is a magical intervention into white supremacist and imperialist patriarchal narratives that extend earlier Black liberation projects challenging rational ideologies” (p. x). Indeed, the book’s introduction and seven chapters illustrate the various ways in which BlackGirlMagic is operationalized, critiqued, and deployed in nonvirtual spaces.
In the introduction, Jordan-Zachary and Harris provide much needed answers to the question of what BlackGirlMagic is and why it is a useful notion for black femmes, girls, and women. They firmly locate BlackGirlMagic within the tents of black feminist thought and thereby offer a theoretical framing for the book, as well a critical intervention in the (mis)use of the idea that places the idea of “magic” outside of reality, by attending to the oftentimes flattened, one-dimensional renderings—or complete erasure—of the realities, meaning-making, and knowledge production of black women, girls, and femmes.
This intervention also lays the groundwork for the rest of the chapters, which consider various geographical, spatial, and social contexts, and approaches to the study of the experiences of black women, femmes, and girls. For example, Chapter 1, “Movement Makers: A Historical Analysis of Black Women’s Magic in Social Movement Formation” by Rashida Harrison, draws on the theoretical framework of transnational black feminism to push the boundaries of BlackGirlMagic beyond the borders of the United States and thereby exposes its potentials for transnational and diasporic solidarities. Indeed, read alongside present-day black transnational feminist praxis, and framed through BlackGirlMagic, Harris’s exploration of black British feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s works to illustrate genealogies in transnational black feminist organizing, whose potentials are now further opened up by technology. Chapter 4, “What Does #BlackGirlMagic Look Like” by Marlo David, on the other hand, explores the aesthetic of Afropunk to theorize the visual aspects of #BlackGirlMagic. As accomplished by each chapter in this volume, Chapter 4 provides additional dimensions and entry points into conversations about the possibilities and pitfalls of the ways BlackGirlMagic has been taken up, such as its potentials for solidarity and fugitivity as well as its commercialization and the corporate interest it has garnered through its popularity. Collectively, this book is a timely and important contribution to the study of black women, girls, and femmes.
