Abstract
Too often, dominant images and popular discourse of black youth in America revolve around damaging stereotypes that depict black youth as thugs, drug-dealers, and criminals; for black girls specifically, the tropes of being loud, angry, violent, and promiscuous prevail. Perhaps worse yet, black girls are often rendered invisible altogether, which makes the need for diverse representations of black girlhood and positive reinforcement of black girls’ creativity and worth all the more important for their healthy development. Enter: Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a weekly community-based youth group for black girls and women Brown founded in 2006 and co-organized in the years following. In a culture often neglectful of or hostile to black girls, SOLHOT provides respite and sanctuary, and a space to collectively interrogate and reimagine varied expressions of black girlhood through art and performance that is centered on individuals’ lived experiences.
Brown’s book documents and analyzes the creative and performance-based research she conducted based on five years of collaborative work in SOLHOT, two of which involved data collection. Like SOLHOT itself, Brown’s work breaks out of conventional models of academic scholarship; rather than a traditional ethnography, Brown’s research employs alternative research methodologies and creative practice. Through these methods and mirrored in her writing style, she deliberately eschews a one-dimensional, linear approach in favor of a more circular, non-Western style that perhaps more accurately represents this multifaceted creative work. Brown poses her research as a feminist, transformative project, not only for the participants of SOLHOT (including the “homegirls,” or adult facilitator-participants, and “girls,” or youth participants) but also for readers both within and outside the academy working toward social change.
Brown first introduces the conceptual framework and foundation that spurred the creation of SOLHOT and has been its driving force. Rather than merely celebrating black girlhood, SOLHOT redefines its meaning by honoring the processual nature of black girlhood: its fluidity, variation, and diversity. Her subsequent chapter shifts focus onto the black women (i.e., “homegirls”) involved in SOLHOT as adult group facilitators. Brown examines the transformative nature of working with black girls for “homegirls” by using interview data with eight facilitators to create a first-person narrative account of their experiences, or what Brown calls “a collective and creative memory” (p. 46). Through this retelling of events, Brown shows how the practice of working with and for black girls transforms black women themselves.
Brown follows this chapter up with her anti-narrative photo-poem, the performance-based vehicle through which she interrogates the systematic marginalization of black girls generally, and black girls in SOLHOT specifically. Brown uses photography created in SOLHOT, artfully combining it with a visually challenging poetic style. The end result is a hybrid performance piece that attempts to portray the complexities and variations of black girl identities, and simultaneously deconstruct the mainstream narratives and images that permeate popular culture.
Brown next explores SOLHOT girls’ experiences with, and stories about, fighting and violence in their everyday lives. While fighting represents survival for many girls in SOLHOT, so too does poetry. Through interview data and four girls’ performance poems, Brown shows the importance for black girls of processing and reclaiming these negative experiences through creative means. Through poetry, fighting and violence took on new meanings, perhaps most importantly as a problem to be addressed publically and collectively, rather than privately and individually.
Lastly, Brown presents original music created by girls in SOLHOT that challenges the way black girls are often heard and perceived, and is organized by three themes: “volume/oppression, swag/surveillance, and booty/capitalism” (p. 188). Brown’s documentation and analysis of this black girlhood sound is a form of hip-hop feminism that confounds a uniform and singular understanding of blackness, girlhood, and the ways they intersect, and instead reveals their complexity and multidimensionality.
Brown’s recognition that SOLHOT is a joint endeavor with both “homegirls” and “girls” as mutual producers of knowledge and creative practice is at the heart of this feminist and progressive work. There are times when the contextual background and analytical framing Brown provides seem disjointed from the data itself, particularly in the second and third chapters. Nonetheless, Brown is successful in her ultimate goal of not simply accounting for the lived experiences of black girls and women but also reconsidering and transforming the assumptions, theories, and popular beliefs that so often are created without the input of black girls and women themselves.
This text may prove difficult for readers used to a more straightforward presentation and organization, and standard academic prose. Therefore, it may be a challenging read for undergraduates, yet would be an interesting addition to graduate courses in Women’s, Gender, and Black Studies, and Human Services programs. Activists, artists, community organizers, and youth leaders will find instructive Brown’s innovative approach to conducting, analyzing, and presenting her work with youth, as well as scholars interested in feminist methodologies, community-based or participatory action research, and alternative research methods.