The Political Aesthetics of Black Girl Magic: Self-Representation in Alternative Media

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the political potential conjured when Black women represent themselves using alternative media such as comic books, self-made digital productions, and artist books using a method I call “auto-ethno-bio-mytho-graphy.” By investigating “Black Girl Magic” (BGM), a popular phrase that describes the scintillating aesthetics of making oneself as a liberatory act, this project emulates the term as an intervention in media studies that approaches theories of communication and the politics of cultural difference by actively centering the experiences of Black women, beginning and ending with the author. I argue that narrative theorizing through alternative visual arts employ transaesthetics that allow Black women to politically represent themselves outside the stereotypes that continue to dominate mainstream media. Drawing on the multi-modal, I utilize textual analysis, curatorial and creative production, as well as (auto)ethnography and community engaged scholarship to reveal how the magic of BGM is often portrayed through a smoke and mirrors metaphor whereby resistance is hegemonically articulated through politics of the visual. In contrast, I propose and this disprove understanding the magic of BGM through the metaphor of witchcraft to dismantle epistemological hierarchies thereby expanding the aesthetics and subsequent political arena of identity representation. Looking beyond appearances, this dissertation asks what politics of resistance sound like, smell like, and feel like. After attempting to describe BGM as flight, or moments of departure, brew, or the materiality of poiesis, and brood as collective actions, affects, and events, I then delve into case studies to further explicate the magic of auto-ethno-bio-mytho-graphic projects. Part one begins with an auteur study of the young actress Amandla Stenberg comparing the constraints of her blockbuster films with the affordances of her independent YouTube videos. The following chapter is a character study of the plus-sized Penny Rolle in the comic Bitch Planet (2015) as cosplayed by two women at a comic convention. Together, these chapters explain moments in which Stenberg and the two cosplayers defy constraints placed on Black women’s subjectivity through a dominance of the visual enacting a politics of self-determination. Part two of the dissertation departs from traditional media studies analysis by presenting my own version of self-representation in an iterative project entitled Which Witch and through a digital curation of my many alternative books, zines, and comics entitled Bookend(ed). In total, I provide analysis of BGM as well as demonstrate the outcomes of embodied BGM through case studies and art making.