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African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. InThe Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person's desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture.The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos's protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander's reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks'sMaud Martha, James Baldwin'sThe Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison'sSulato move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.

What do we learn when Black girls have the right to their own pleasures … the right to sit … and be still? Given the ways this world seeks to steal moments of joy and self-satisfaction from Black girls everywhere, what is the power of capturing the moments in which Black girls are allowed to be, to exist? To answer these questions, I reflect upon the act of “sitting” and its use in facilitating moments of interiority for Black girlhood in documentation photography. Mobilizing Tina Campt’s and Kevin Quashie’s notions of quiet to contend with documentary portraits of Black girls by Scheherazade Tillet and Nydia Blas, I meditate on their use of gesture in order to formulate an experimental and conceptual archive of Black girl interiority. This piece considers the act and moment of “sitting” in visual art and what it conveys about the process of subject-making in the lives of Black girls.