My friend and colleague Dr. Janaka Bowman Lewis is the author of Light and Legacies: Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation, which the University of South Carolina Press just released as part of its Cultures of Resistance Series. Light and Legacies is grounded in Janaka’s deep knowledge of literary texts by Black women writers, but this book does not have the feel of a dry, academic treatise. Janaka combines her critical analyses of texts with her personal reflections about growing up Black in the American South and about being a parent of two Black children. For example, when discussing a novel that she initially read as a teenager, she often comments on how she responded to this novel when she first encountered it. The result is a highly readable and thought-provoking examination of stories about Black girlhood. For more information about this book, please click on the following link: https://uscpress.com/Light-and-Legacies
Janaka and I share an interest in how children often incorporate narrative elements in their play. Several years ago, we had a long conversation about the depiction of children’s play in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave. Since that conversation, Janaka has developed an overarching approach to analyzing the significance of play in narratives about Black childhood. She writes, “Narratives of the culture of play extend from the earliest known African American narratives through civil rights-era narratives and into the modern period. … Play serves as confirmation, modeling, and, eventually, transition into a world in which the narrator has the ability to comprehend and, ultimately, escape the ways in which he or she is objectified.”
In Light and Legacies, Janaka examines the play of Black girls as depicted in such texts as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography, and Alice Childress’s Rainbow Jordan. Janaka’s discussion of these texts is detailed and nuanced. She avoids overgeneralizing, but she points out important patterns in how children’s play figures in these narratives.
Janaka titles her epilogue “Reading Play as Resistance,” and this title nicely encapsulates the core argument that runs throughout Light and Legacies. In her analysis of the various stories of Black girlhood that she covers in her book, Janaka shows play can function as a form of resistance and can provide Black girls with visions of “different ways of being.” Janaka’s book is all about the transformative power of play.
I congratulate Janaka on the publication of Light and Legacies: Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation. I enjoyed reading it, and I think it would appeal to anyone in Storied Charlotte who is interested in Black women writers, play studies, and Black girlhood.