Slippin’ in and out of frame: An Afrafuturist feminist orientation to Black women and American citizenship

Abstract

Heeding Karma Chavez’s (2015) call to imagine rhetoric as “something entirely different,” I introduce what I call an Afrafuturist Feminist (AFF) rhetorical approach with the aim of offering one means by which rhetorical studies can move beyond normative white constructions of citizenship. In this piece, I flesh out a theoretical framework that explores the ways Black women’s truthtelling engineers rival conceptions of Blackness, creating spaces for us to reimagine what citizenship can look like in the lived experiences of Black Americans. I invoke the phrase, “in and out of frame,” to preliminarily consider how Black women like Assata Shakur and Cardi B employ rhetoric as threat to negotiate citizenship in the 20th and 21st centuries.