How girls of color from eight global communities strategize on
questions of identity, social issues, and political policy through
spoken word poetry.
Around the world,
girls know how to perform. Grounded in her experience of “putting a
mic in the margins” by facilitating workshops for girls in
Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States,
scholar/advocate/artist Crystal Leigh Endsley highlights how girls
use spoken word poetry to narrate their experiences, dreams, and
strategies for surviving and thriving. By centering the process of
creating and performing spoken word poetry, this book examines how
girls forecast what is possible for their collective lives.
In this book,
Endsley combines poetry, discourse analysis, photovoice, and more to
forge the feminist theory of “quantum justice,” which forefronts
girls’ relationships with their global counterparts. Using quantum
justice theory, Endsley examines how these collaborative efforts
produce powerful networks and ultimately map trajectories of social
change at the micro level. By inviting transnational dialogue through
spoken word poetry, Quantum Justice emphasizes how the
imaginative energy in hip-hop culture can mobilize girls to connect
and motivate each other through spoken word performance and thereby
disrupt the status quo.
