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CaShawn Thompson crafted Black Girls Are Magic as a proclamation of Black women's resilience in 2013. Less than five years later, it had been repurposed as a gateway to an attractive niche market. Branding Black Womanhood: Media Citizenship from Black Power to Black Girl Magic examines the commercial infrastructure that absorbed Thompson's mantra. While the terminology may have changed over the years, mainstream brands and mass media companies have consistently sought to acknowledge Black women's possession of a distinct magic or power when it suits their profit agendas. Beginning with the inception of the Essence brand in the late 1960s, Timeka N. Tounsel examines the individuals and institutions that have reconfigured Black women's empowerment as a business enterprise. Ultimately, these commercial gatekeepers have constructed an image economy that operates as both a sacred space for Black women and an easy hunting ground for their dollars.

This essay examines Nigerian women's transgressive sexualities as a redefinition of African womanhood. It identifies emerging transgressive sexualities in third-generation Nigerian literature, such as lesbianism and Nigerian Muslim women's sexual nonconformity, as compelling counternarratives against dominant masculinist discourses of heterosexism and religious orthodoxy. Referring to Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees (2015) and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim's Season of Crimson Blossoms (2015), this essay shows how patriarchy, backed by religious dogma, constructs the female body and sexuality. By demonstrating Nigerian women's act of decolonizing their gendered bodies from masculinist and religious discourses of oppression, it identifies women's quest for sexual freedom as an epistemic revisioning of African womanhood.

This paper argues that the philosophy of Buddhist emptiness not only finds expression in Alice Walker’s Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart with its two most salient manifestationsdependent origination and impermanence, but is applied to alleviate suffering in the poetry, and the two approaches the poetry collection are (1) to recognize emptiness in times of crisis and (2) to cultivate bodhicitta through using emptiness to extend loving kindness to all beings. Furthermore, it is argued that emptiness enriches Buddhist womanism by strengthening its theoretical underpinnings, redirecting the focus from practice to cognitive transformation, and harmonizing the priorities of individual and communal wellbeing.

Tonglen is a Tibetan Buddhist practice that aims at developing the practitioner’s bodhicitta. In this article, I argue that it not only finds expression in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple through the protagonist Celie, but adds more complexity to the womanist philosophy for which Walker has been ensconced in positions of influence. More specifically, Celie follows an implied Buddhist practice of tonglen; in the process of “taking in and sending out”, her bodhicitta has been generated and cultivated. Underlying her tonglen practice is Buddhist womanism demonstrating how African American women can survive the social oppression and injustice by way of acknowledging their own terrible afflictions, empathizing with those enduring intense suffering, male and female, extending their loving kindness, comprehending the absence of intrinsic entity and the principle of dependent origination, etc. In addition, the article suggests that the fight for the survival of the oppressed is a type of Buddhist practice in Walker’s Buddhist womanism.

Abstract Teaching Black girl pedagogies is a way to truly see them in educational spaces, to see them in their fullness, recognizing their complex and entangled identities. Black feminism and womanism are foundational to Black girl pedagogical praxis, and work to push against misrepresentations of Black girls and Black girlhoods, as well as identify and challenge the linked processes of criminalization and adultification experienced by all Black children. Through my own experiences as a Black girl in the US K-12 education system I draw on Black feminism to highlight the importance of engaging with and using Black girl pedagogies as a practice of co-creation between educators and students.

This paper argues that genealogical ties exist between the “national-masculine” literary tradition that characterized the sexual politics of the Ibadan modernist arts journal Black Orpheus and the homosocial environments of the colonial boarding schools and university system of Nigeria. Within this flagship journal, a certain form of short story thematized social issues and forms of violence commonly associated with Western second-wave feminism and frequently siloed under the category of “women’s issues.” These included general sexual violence, abortion, and rape. The symbolic handling of these forms of violence within Black Orpheus is notable because it marks a sharp departure from similarly gendered issues within contemporaneous market literature and stands in contrast to social concerns raised by African women writers who were the male authors’peers. Like the authors of market literatures, these texts do not engage women as rounded subjects capable of speaking their own minds. Yet unlike market literatures, these texts flatten womanhood in order to engage in performative acts of solidarity, allyship, and/or sympathy with figures of womanhood, especially—and ironically—related to issues surrounding women’s bodily autonomy. In short, these works allowed male authors to construct fictionalized women and fictionalized male voices to speak for and of them.