Permutation do both- Hauntological speculation is an instance of embodiment that connects the legacy of Black girlhood through practices of remembering.

In 2012, Kasandra Perkins of Kansas City, Missouri, was murdered by her partner, Jovan Belcher. This same year, I entered a doctoral program at the University of Illinois, the same institution I graduated two years prior, and was given the assignment to create a final project reflective of my academic interests. As I prepared my assignment, I was confronted with the news of Perkins’s death and experienced a visceral response to the brutal incident. Importantly, I came back to graduate school to organize and write with and about Black girlhood in this doctoral program and the Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) collective, and just as I was preparing to make a claim about what I came back to this place and city to do, I was reminded of the kind of work SOLHOT had already prepared me for through its intentional collective practices. The final project for this proseminar course resulted in a performance entitled “Kasi to her Homegirls,” which was influenced by previous work done in SOLHOT as a result of SOLHOT’s intentional work with Black girls and the praxis of Black feminism. Envisioned by Ruth Nicole Brown and brought to life by a collective of Black women and girls in central Illinois in 2006, SOLHOT is a collective of people who believe Black girlhood is an embodiment and practice of collective worldmaking with Black girls and women as a means of self-articulation within the collective. This worldmaking is only possible through particular practices such as knowing and remembering, listening to Black girls and women, and collective musicmaking. These practices make up a repertoire of collective Black girlhood praxis. A repertoire, as theorized by performance studies scholar Diana Taylor, functions as a set of performances that, unlike an archive of those cultural memories that would privilege the written text or narrative of those actions, acknowledges that those performances operate as ever-changing and alive instead of a captured memory. In this way, those performances are scenarios operating as “meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes” (2003, 28). To this degree, knowing and remembering is a scenario (whenever the practice of performance happens), which acknowledges Black girls and women, in particular, as well as the people and things that make the collective possible. Additionally, knowing and remembering contributes to our (the collective’s) understanding of Black girlhood as an organizing construct invested in alternative modes of being; that is, subversion to anti-Blackness and heteropatriarchy, as central to building power through our relationship and accountability to one another. These scenarios within SOLHOT’s repertoire, then, “make visible, yet again, what is already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes” with the goal of recalibration of these scenarios to conjure new futures and renewed stories of the past and present (Taylor 2003, 28). This function of SOLHOT can be described by Terrion L. Williamson in her work Scandalize My Name (2016) as a Black feminist practice. Williamson makes the connection between Black social life and Black feminist practice as meaningful ways of living that do not require Blackness to be qualified by ideas of citizenship, value, or representation but instead by the everyday life-making and saving practices Black women and girls participate in. In this way, Williamson, like SOLHOT, is invested in exploring the ways death and life are entangled for Black people, and the ways that, because of this precarious situation, Black women and girls participate in Black feminist practices that require resistance (whether intentional or not) to imperial ideas of being alive. For example, Williamson grapples with discourses around violence, teenage pregnancy campaigns, and practices like wearing weaves or hair straightening to consider ways in which adherence to the degradation of these practices reinforces white supremacist standards. Williamson explores Black social life through interrogating “the terrain of black female experience . . . made legible by black women’s lives and bodies in the making of a sociality that is firmly rooted in the black imaginary” (2016, 10). In this way, these practices inform the life-making and saving practices of Black women and girls in the everyday, “not circumscribed by the conditions of its possibility but instead enriched and enlarged by the embrace of the mundane and everyday” (5). This, then, makes the space possible to remember someone like Kasi Perkins, and guides a practice like SOLHOT where the objective is not to ask, Why are Black women and girls treated inhumanely?—a question we already know the answer to—but rather, How do we/have we create/d the alternative with what we already know about ourselves and other Black women and girls? With focus on the collective’s practice of knowing and remembering, this chapter explores performances of this practice as speculative, which conjures reappearances of people and ideas invoked through the practice. Specifically, by tracing our knowing and remembering through Black feminist texts that influence the work of SOLHOT, as well as performances of knowing and remembering created in SOLHOT such as that of “Kasi to Her Homegirls,” this chapter theorizes Black girlhood hauntings and the speculative reappearances explored through Black feminist texts and SOLHOT performances as a collective self-articulation of Black girlhood. It is not simply a categorization of a time period or visual representation of a girl, but is a nonstatic and imaginative mode that honors the experiences, genius, and contribution of Black girls. This theorization of Black girlhood through imaginative modes offers a tangible, collective practice of BlackGirlMagic through Black women and girls organizing together to create new modes of sensing and seeing each other. BlackGirlMagic, a term associated with the “Black Girls are Magic” movement started in 2013 by CaShawn Thompson, has been used in digital spaces as a way to affirm and acknowledge the accomplishments of Black women. Thompson explains her use of magic to point to the invisibility of Black women’s labor and work. She states, “Our accomplishments might seem to come out of thin air, because a lot of times, the only people supporting us are other black women” (quoted in Thomas 2015). Similarly, SOLHOT depends on Black women and girls being in collective relationship to one another. This interdependence generates an articulation of power recognized as magic that relies on building community where you live, through collective worldmaking with Black women and girls, to imagine political power outside of capitalism. In this way, this paper puts forth Black girlhood hauntings and speculative reappearances as a critique of neoliberal articulations of the future, and as an exploration of articulating the self through collective acts.