Introduction to Special Issue: Black Girlhood and Kinship

"My child, your father is dead." . . . I thought I should be allowed to go to my father's house the next morning; but I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings.

—Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

By invoking the materiality of love and loss, from the perspective of an orphaned, enslaved black girl, Harriet Jacobs demonstrates how kinship engages all of the self—feelings, senses, memory, touch, and embodiment. Jacobs remembers the beautiful ugliness of the flowers that took her attention away from "wake work," away from being with her beloved father's body (Sharpe 2016). At the beginning of her narrative, Jacobs situates herself within her family, demonstrating the bonds between herself, her brother, her grandmother, and her father. She received unconditional love from them, but, importantly, she also learned a sense of self-worth—she learned to view herself as a "human being." These bonds that built her up were precarious; premature death took her father, and a white woman's command interrupted the family rituals of mourning. As Jacobs engages with how black enslaved girls faced divided claims, obligations, and loyalties, her text questions how black girls came to see themselves as worthy and how they searched for the missing pieces of self that were left behind.

This special issue of Women, Gender, and Families of Color (WGFC) on kinship in black girls' worlds considers a wide range of intimate relationships from the nuclear family sustained by Jacobs's love for her father, through guardianship contracts imposed on formerly enslaved girls in Senegal, to supportive social media networks created by high school girls in Richmond, Virginia. By considering all of these relationships as forms of kinship, we can better appreciate how black girls forge intimate bonds where they can be loved, cherished, and supported—as Jacobs found from her father—and also how these hopes sometimes end in disappointment, betrayal, and loss—as Jacobs also realized at a young age. By keeping youth in mind, we can understand how black girls' experience of family differs from that of their mothers and grandmothers and begin to rewrite the study of kinship from black girls' perspectives.

This issue grew out of a conference, "The Global History of Black Girlhood," at the University of Virginia in 2017. An interdisciplinary and inter-generational conversation among scholars, activists, and students interested in the historical experience of black girls in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, this conference considered black girls' self-understandings, creativity, relationships, and political aspirations. By focusing this special issue on the subject of kinship and black girls in a diasporic framework, we draw attention to how coming of age is a relational process, how girls seek both interdependence and independence in relation with others.

Black girls' studies has emerged as a consolidated field of interdisciplinary research in the past thirteen years.¹ Scholars in the field have pursued a number of different approaches: linking black girls' creativity to the development of popular culture (for example, Brown and Kwakye 2012; Waters, Evans-Winters, and Love 2018; and Halliday and Brown 2018); rethinking the historical archive to highlight age as a category of analysis²; using an intersectional lens to examine the marginalization of black girls in narratives of state violence (Crenshaw, Ocen, and Nanda 2015; Morris 2016); studying the ways in which childhood innocence has excluded black girls, leading to adultification (Bernstein 2011; Epstein, Blake, and González 2017); and working with black girls themselves—or in the ethnographic tradition—to (re)create definitions of girlhood and survival (Brown 2013, Carroll 1997, Cox 2015, and Love 2012). Much of the work in the field thus far has centered...