&: Black Girl Ligatures
The title of this talk “&: Black Girl Ligatures” is also the working title of Professor Curseen’s second book.
Building off my first book Minor Moves which focuses on antebellum depiction of black girls’ physical movement, the second project explores 19th and 20th century moments of moving together as black sisters. By “black sisters” here, I mean neither a strictly blood kinship nor an identity- or political-based affinity. Rather than sisterhood, the project focuses on something more akin to what Toni Morrison in Sula describes as “[being] girls together.” The project traces the often minor material of black girls being black girls together through a mix of literary and other cultural texts that highlight black girls’ dance, play, praise, and other forms of ecstatic expression. In this talk, I will focus on what I call black girl ligatures. Organized around a meditation on the ampersand, I ask us to think about moments where black girls’ being together shows up as an ecstatic tie, a bind–a being more than singular.