This talk examines the creative work of Dr. Eve L. Ewing in light of contemporary conversations on Black girls and adultification. Building on my larger project on Black girl representation and cultivating critical practices of speculation, I read the poetry (Electric Arches) and comics writing (Ironheart) of Ewing as a methodological demonstration of the alternative Black visual grammars that Black girlhood enables. Teaching us to see the world through an intersectional frame, I argue more broadly that Black girl representation pushes us to read against the bounds of genre and speculate on the futurity of ordinary Black life.

Dr. Kiana T. Murphy is a scholar artist and postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and her B.A. in English and Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on speculative representations of Black children in literature, comics, music, and visual art, and she teaches a range of courses at the intersection of Black speculative fiction, Black and queer feminisms, archive studies, and Black girlhood studies. In 2019-2020, she served as co-curator of the Spring 2020 exhibit and conference “Writing Across Genres: African American Women Writers in the Joanna Banks Collection,” hosted in Philadelphia, and co-coordinator of the interdisciplinary working group the Black Cultural Studies Collective. She is currently writing about the representation of Black girls in comics and Gloria Naylor’s literary and archival contributions to contemporary conversations on Black feminist worldbuilding. In 2022, she will be a Huntington Library Fellow where she will conduct research in the Octavia Butler collection. 

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