UC Berkeley

Amid the popularity of representations of Black girls in U.S. media over the past thirty years, my dissertation charts how literature, film, television, and social media has helped shape our cultural understanding of what it means to be young, Black, and female in the U.S. I argue that the Black girl attitude is a misunderstood trope. It is not a singular attitude. Rather, the Black-girl attitude is a sequence of gestures and choreographic acts used to survive a moment. Combining extensive research from African American literary studies, Black girlhood studies, and performance and media studies, my dissertation assembles compelling cultural artifacts that call attention to the increasing love for and theft of youthful Black femininity in American culture between 1989 and 2019. My critical framework plays on the term “literature,” truncating it to “lit,” a word that refers not only to the past participle of “light” but also colloquially connotes the brilliance and outstanding nature of the Black girls on which I focus. I argue that to be lit is to be young, Black, and female experiencing the light and shadows that results from life’s euphoria and its withdrawals. I define “lit” as: 1) the liminal space between Black girlhood and Black womanhood 2) the affective spectrum between Black girl joy and Black girl rage. As a result of these “lit” experiences, I assert that Black girls do not come of age, but rather, they “come of (r)age.”

I delineate four valuable articulations of rage as the foundation for why coming of (r)age is the paradigm shift desperately needed in apprehending how Black girls experience their maturation processes. These articulations include: 1) to become raged upon, 2) to rage against, 3) to become all the rage, and 4) to become enraged. This framework troubles existing notions about the maturation processes of Black girls by highlighting rage as an integral part of their survival as they transition into Black women. In doing so, coming of (r)age provides scholars with the necessary framework for dismantling mediated representations of the “Black-girl attitude” and the “angry-Black woman” tropes. By pivoting away from these antiquated stereotypes to coming of (r)age, we now have new language and groundbreaking knowledge to dismantle the images that pin Black girls as culturally deviant. Through coming of (r)age, mediated representations of Black girls can now be seen as not only culturally relevant, but also culturally vital.