This article is a revised and expanded version of my presidential address delivered during the 74th Annual Conference of the Literacy Research Association. Part biography and autoethnography, I discuss the need to ‘trouble five dark spaces’ that affect the literacy development of black male children and teenagers: (1) bounded research orientations and studies, (2) state and national achievement authorizations in the United States, (3) peculiar dispositions and curriculum orientations, (4) absence of textual lineages and foundational texts, and (5) acquiescence to unnatural literacy hierarchies. Focusing on the challenges and delimits of being bounded, I offer conceptual guidance for exalting the literacy development of black male students in the United States.
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