New Directions in Black Girlhood and Childhood

Historical scholarship has been enriched by approaches to history which deploy analytical categories of analysis with theoretical rigor. This essay examines the merging field of Black Childhood Studies and its power to transform historical analyses and expand categories of analysis to race, gender, and age. With a focus on the ways in which the courts contorted themselves to criminalize Black girls in racially specific ways, this essay illuminates new approaches to carceral studies and history. The historical implications of such theorizations that center Black children broadly, and Black girls specifically, reaches beyond applications in gender studies, African American studies, and Childhood studies separately. Such studies would also deepen critical analysis and reveal more nuanced understandings of time and space for the field of history.