All the Stars are Closer

The purpose of our chapter is to disrupt and resist the ways that Black girls’ multimodal practices are silenced in traditional research and in the broader U.S. social context. Specifically, we center Black girls’ multimodal, self-expressive practices to dismantle oppressive, eurocentric constructions of Black girls’ ways of being and temporality. We ask: (a) “How do Black girls use multimodal practices to time travel between their pasts, presents, and futures in a dystopian world?” and (b) “Why is it significant for us as Black Women scholars to advocate for spaces that allow Black girls to time travel through multimodal practices?”

Black girls are living in a dystopian reality that needs to be interrupted now. For them, the future is now and it is causing them harm. Traditionally, the notion of dystopia refers to a future filled with immense suffering; however, this is the current condition for Black girls due to gendered antiBlackness (Collins, 1991). Black girls are failed by linear timelines that set the future as a rigid destination, ultimately restricting the range of possibilities by through hyper-analysis of the present. Thus, Black girls must be provided opportunities to time travel through multimodal practices which will amplify and honor their past histories and present realities to author their own futures.

Building on this premise, we conceptualize Black girls’ time travel in a Black feminist futurities framework (Barnard Center for Research on Women, 2014) layered with Black girlhood theories (Brown, 2009, 2013) to elucidate how Black girls critically leverage their own multimodal practices (e.g., making images, videos, material objects) for personal communication and meaning making (New London Group, 1996). Through these conceptual lenses, we theorize how Black girls use multimodal practices to enter temporalities that are matriarchal, communal, and nonlinear, allowing them to engage in self-expression, social critique, collective healing and future making. We first discuss popular multimedia (e.g., films) as a multimodal practice that pushes back against dominant constructions of Black girls by centering them as technocultural creators, scientists, purveyors of knowledge and time travelers, such as Black Panther (Coogler et al., 2018) and See You Yesterday (Bristol et al., 2019), a Netflix sci-fi film which focuses on C. J., a Black girl scientist who develops a time-traveling machine to save her older brother. We then turn to academic scholarship to examine how Black girls open possibilities to the past, present, and future through visual art practices (e.g., drawing/sketching, photography, digital collage) and embodied practices (e.g., hair). We conclude with a call to action for literacy researchers and educators to create spaces where Black girls’ critical multimodal practices facilitate their ability to travel beyond the oppressive logics, temporalities, and realities of a White patriarchal capitalist dystopia, as they reclaim their power and histories, re-center their lived experiences, and envision their futures on their own terms.