ABSTRACT HUMANITIES PERRO, EBONY L. B.A. UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA AT LAFAYETTE, 2011 M.A. UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA AT LAFAYETTE, 2014 COMING OF (R)AGE: CONSTRUCTING COUNTERNARRATIVES OF BLACK GIRLHOOD FROM THE ANGRY DECADE TO THE AGE OF RAGE Committee Chair: Stephanie Sears, Ph.D. Dissertation dated July 2019 This dissertation assesses rage and its utility for fictional Black girls and adolescents in asserting their humanity, accessing their voices, and developing strategies of resistance that contribute to their identity formation. Through analyses of six novels: 1) God Bless the Child, 2) Breath, Eyes, Memory, 3) The Hate U Give, 4) The Bluest Eye, 5) Daddy Was a Number Runner, and 6) The Poet X, this research presents rage as a canonical theme in Black women’s coming-of-age narratives and presents connections between rage, rights, and resistance. The connections, revealed through stimuli and adaptations associated with rage, frame an argument for North Americas as an arbiter of anger. The novels construct an “arc of anger” that places them in conversation about Black girl rage and presents a tradition of Black women crafting Black girl protagonists who are conduits for counternarratives of rage. This dissertation also examines how i history, memory, and culture contribute to Black girls’ frustrations and knowledge bases. By looking to works published between the angry decade (the 1960s) and the age of rage (the 2010s), the research presents ways Black women novelists and their characters return to rage to combat social institutions and critique social constructions of Black girlhood and womanhood. ii COMING OF (R)AGE: CONSTRUCTING COUNTERNARRATIVES OF BLACK GIRLHOOD FROM THE ANGRY DECADE TO THE AGE OF RAGE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF CLARK ATLANTA UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY EBONY LE’ANN PERRO DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES ATLANTA, GEORGIA JULY 2019 © 2019 EBONY LE’ANN PERRO All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to acknowledge Black girls for being beacons of hope. I thank them for their anger, wisdom, and creativity. This work would not be possible without the inspiration of Black girls and the people who supported me. I thank my mother, Barbara Perro Frederick and my sister, Sydnie, who made sacrifices for my education. I appreciate my extended family for their prayers. I thank my committee for encouraging me and devoting their time and expertise to this project. I am eternally grateful to Dr. Stephanie Sears for leading this project and to Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans for her leadership in the African American Studies, Africana Women’s Studies, and History Department. I am humbled and honored to have worked with Dr. Maia Butler. I thank her for her mentorship and friendship. I am sincerely grateful to the faculty and staff who invested their energy in me: Dr. Rico Chapman, Dr. Daniel Black, Dr. Viktor Osinubi, Dr. Tamalyn Peterson, Dr. Danille Taylor, Mr. Clarence Wilson, and Ms. Mary Jackson. I thank my Clark Atlanta University family (especially Marcus and Amanda) for loving me through this process. I appreciate everyone who supported me financially and emotionally. I am thankful for my best friend, Jess, for her support and patience. I say Ubuntu to my mentor and honorary reader, Jessica Jones. Lastly, I am forever indebted to the ancestors, Dr. Georgene Bess-Montgomery, and my Black girl rage class for reminding of the functions of this work beyond the classroom. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 1 Purpose of the Research .................................................................................... 6 Statement of the Problem ................................................................................ 10 Research Questions ......................................................................................... 12 Significance of the Study ................................................................................ 12 Return to Rage: Coming-of-Age Narratives and Anger ................................. 14 Lift Every Voice: Black Girl Protagonists and Black Feminist Storytelling ............................................................................ 20 Margins, Lines, and Arcs: Black Feminist Orientations and Literary Criticism ............................................................................................ 25 Chapter Organization ...................................................................................... 29 II. LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................... 33 Theoretical Framework ................................................................................... 33 Racialized Rage: Critical Attention to Intersectional Anger .......................... 39 From Margin to Center: Black Girlhood Studies ............................................ 56 Building from the Bildungsroman: Coming-of-Age in Literary Criticism ............................................................................................ 65 Black Girl Rage: Interstices of Intersectional Work ....................................... 73 III. METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................... 76 Research Design.............................................................................................. 78 Justification for Method: Black Feminist Leanings ........................................ 86 Research Ethics ................................................................................................88 iv CHAPTER IV. CARTOGRAPHIES OF BLACK GIRL RAGE: MAPPING MEMORY AND HISTORY THROUGH NATIONAL NARRATIVE DISCREPANCIES .......................................................................................... 92 American Dreams and Nightmares: Anger and Antagonism in God Bless the Child ................................................................................................................ 96 Transnational Traumas: Diasporic Iterations of Adolescent Anger ............. 109 THUG LIFE: Rage, Rights, and Resistance ................................................. 119 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 133 V. WHITE NOISE, BLACK RAGE: COUNTERING HEGEMONIC VIOLENCE ACROSS PLACE AND TIME THROUGH BLACK GIRL EPISTEMOLOGIES .................................................................................... 136 In Living Color(ism): Morrison, Melanin, and Black Girl Rage .................. 141 Enraged in Harlem: Canonical Knowledge and Radical Subjectivity .......... 153 “No tú eres facil”: Afro-Latinx Adaptations of Anger ................................. 163 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 174 IV. CONCLUSION: LIBERATION AND LITERATURE: TOWARD COUNTERNARRATIVES OF BLACK GIRL RAGE ............................... 177 Arcs of Anger: Black Girl Rage in Black Women’s Literature .................... 180 Layers of Liberation: Implications of the Study ........................................... 183 Extending the Arc: Rage into the Future ...................................................... 187 WORKS CITED ...........................................................................................................191 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Blackgirls carry answers, solutions to our ailments and yours/ just watch our movement, and mind our stories. (Hill 8) Dominique Hill’s encouragement to mind Black girls’ stories calls attention to their experiences and voices. While Hill writes of real Black girls as solution-builders and knowledge-bearers, critical inquiry of novels reveals that Black women novelists envision fictitious Black girls in parallel manners. To that end, Black girl narratives are repositories for alternative epistemologies. From the stories of real and imagined (literary) Black girls, it is possible to ruminate ideas that aid in Black people’s liberation. Their stories assert their voices and illuminate Black girlhood as a decolonial force. From Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and Maria Stewart’s “The First Stages of Life” (1861) to Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017) and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (2018), accounts of girlhood position Black girls as adapters with “perceptive wit” who reveal behaviors that “if followed, will lead African Americans one step closer toward achieving full citizenship rights in all aspects of American life” (Wright, “Maria W. Stewart’s ‘The First Stage of Life’” 152-153). Perceptive wit arises from anger, marginalization, and denial of childhood. Listening to and investigating their stories reveals discrepancies 1 2 between Black girls’ narratives and narratives presented by broader society. Narrative arcs created by entwined national and personal narratives inform stories and interpretations of Black girl rage. Despite tendencies to view rage as a loss of control, Black women’s fiction posits this emotion as two-fold: a controlled rage exerted through the prose and a stimulus-driven, adaptive rage experienced by Black girl protagonists. Black women’s literary canon and contemporary conversations in feminist and womanist studies position anger and rage as integral to social change and personal development. Alice