Black Girls and How We Fail Them
“In Black Girls and How We Fail Them, Aria Halliday eloquently and incisively captures the relationship between popular culture and the sociological realities that shape our collective understanding of race and gender in America. Halliday's book is a penetrating examination of how depictions of Black girls and women in music, film, and politics both animate and reflect the way they are treated in society at large. This book is both an invitation and an opportunity. I am so grateful it exists.”
—Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America

"Black Girls and How We Fail Them is a timely and honest love letter to Black girls and an exploration of accountability for those who love and misunderstand them alike. A must-read for those inside and outside popular culture's long reach."
—Regina N. Bradley, author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South

"This book feels like a conversation that I’ve been longing to have or listen in on, being held by people who are invested, hosted by a friend. Piercingly insightful. Honest. Mad. Vulnerable. Understanding. May we take heed of Aria Halliday's words and insights."
—Crystal Leigh Endsley, author of Quantum Justice: Global Girls Cultivating Disruption through Spoken Word Poetry

"Refreshingly straightforward. Through twelve media examples, Aria Halliday highlights how society's participation in the spread of misogynoir creates conditions that repeatedly shortchange Black girls in every aspect of their lives, offering examples that show the potential for change."
—Moya Bailey, author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance

Buy Black
How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture
“Buy Black offers an important and well-argued consideration of the Black women cultural producers who, in an effort to subvert a misogynoiristic system, sometimes traffic in the very stereotypical practices they wish to upend. Halliday’s concept of ‘embodied objectification’ helps to make clear our own investments in consumer capitalism and prompts us to be more circumspect about our participation as a means to some ultimately unsatisfying end.”
—Dr. Moya Bailey, author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance

"In focusing on Black women as culture-makers, the book provides a uniquely important view as to the ways that Black women's ingenuity and entrepreneurship have been largely overlooked in understanding these questions. I was consistently impressed with the author's ability to cast a wide net that moves across many topics, while keeping it all held together so that the shape and fit seem right."
—Dr. Elizabeth Chin, author of My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries

"A brilliant and meticulously researched exploration of how ideas about representing blackness have been essential to the story of American consumerism and popular culture. In uncovering how Black women have transformed corporate discourses of multiculturalism and diversity by inserting their own imaginations, capabilities, and desires, Buy Black provides an extraordinary feminist reading of the role of race, gender, and class in the American consumer product industry. Aria Halliday’s book is essential reading."
—Mireille Miller-Young, author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography

The Black Girlhood Studies Collection
“The field of Black Girlhood Studies deserves a book this beautiful, this powerful, and this affirming. Halliday has put together a collection of works that truly loves Black girls. Each chapter is unique and interdisciplinary. It asks us to explore how we understand Black girlhood today. Don’t just read this book: deeply study it. The collective knowledge within these pages will push the field and our communities for years to come.”
—Dr. Bettina L. Love, Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia, and author of We Want to Do More Than Survive and Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak

“This collection, expertly edited by the emerging and ambitious scholar Aria Halliday, is both an inoculation and an antidote, as well as a testament to the exponential power of Black Girlhood Studies. The text is a savvy reframing of the too-often denied legibility of Black girls’ worthiness—their need for protection, play, security, imagination, and prevention from harm. This volume is its own world-making of the past, present, and future, reshaping the context in which Black girls can finally shine.”
—Dr. Kyra D. Gaunt, University at Albany, SUNY, and author of the prize-winning book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop

​“This groundbreaking collection brings together some of the most brilliant emerging and leading scholars in Black Girlhood Studies. Offering both intellectually rigorous and deeply affective insights, this collection shows us why we need Black Girlhood Studies and how to do it well. This is the collection Black girls deserve.”
—Dr. Treva Lindsey, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University, and author of Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

RESEARCH

Dr. Halliday has made some of her most cited articles available for free download! Contact her directly for other articles.

The Power of Black Girl Magic Anthems: Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, and “Feeling Myself” as Political Empowerment
Aria S. Halliday & Nadia E. Brown
Published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (2018)

Abstract:
Nicki Minaj and Beyoncéare two of the most successful Black women artists in today’s popular culture. They occupy a hypervisible and invisible position in Black and mainstream popular culture, and therefore exist as a crucial discursive site to understand Black girls’ self-articulation as “blackgirlmagic” at this moment. Faced with the rise of public feminist and postracial discourses presented in new digital media forms, Minaj and Beyoncé’s representations of sexualized Black femininity reimagined popular notions of race, gender, sexuality, and representation. Both women navigate sexuality and play, which allows them to promote claims to sexual autonomy, consent, and empowerment for girls. Together, they articulated blackness as arrogance, femininity as sexual confidence, and friendship as powerfully seductive in the song “Feeling Myself” (2015). We argue that the song became a #blackgirlma- gic anthem for Black girls and women because of the ways Black girls and women engaged with the song on social media. They created a visual language to articulate the political stakes of #blackgirlmagic in an age of police brutality, anti-blackness, and misogyny. Through the use of focus group data with young Black women, we assess how this particular brand of “blackgirlmagic” impacts the political behavior and empowerment of Black college aged women.
Souls2018 w/ Nadia Brown: The Power of Black Girl Magic Anthems: Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, and “Feeling Myself” as Political Empowerment
File Size: 354 kb
File Type: pdf
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Miley, What’s Good? Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda, Instagram Reproductions, and Viral Memetic Violence
Aria S. Halliday
Published in Girlhood Studies 11, no. 3 (Winter 2018): 67-83

Abstract:
Images on popular social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter that are the most entertaining are loaded with memetic power because their value is based on cultural attitudes that already constitute our lives in the everyday. Focusing on memes appropriating the artwork from Nicki Minaj’s single, Anaconda, I explore how popular memetic culture is fueled by Black women’s creativity yet positions Black women’s bodies as the fodder for potent viral images on social media platforms and in everyday experiences; Black girlhoods, at this level of representation and in lived experiences, are rarely awarded the distinction from womanhood that many other girlhoods enjoy. Thus, Black feminist discourses of desire which speak to both girlhoods and womanhoods inform my argument that social media has become a site of reproduction and consumption—a technological auction block where Black women’s bodies, aesthetics, and experiences are vilified for viral enjoyment.
GirlhoodStudies2018: Miley What's Good: Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda, Instagram Reproductions, and Viral Memetic Violence
File Size: 102 kb
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Envisioning Black Girl Futures Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda Feminism and New Understandings of Black Girl Sexuality in Popular Culture
Aria S. Halliday
Published in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Vol. 6, Number 3 (2017)

Abstract:
Black girlhood exists in a world that is constantly trying to negate it. Black vernacular traditions, too, allow girls to be considered “fast” or “womanish” based on their perceived desire or sexuality. However, Black girlhood studies presents a space where Black girls can claim their own experiences and futures. This essay engages how Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” is fertile ground to help demystify Black girls’ possibilities for finding sexual pleasure and self- determination. Using hip-hop feminism, I argue that “Anaconda” presents a Black feminist sexual politics that encourages agency for Black girls, providing a “pinkprint” for finding pleasure in their bodies. ​
DCQR2017: Envisioning Black Girl Futures: Nicki Minaj's Anaconda Feminism and Black Girl Sexuality
File Size: 137 kb
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