According to Brown in Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood, the girlhood studies discourses of Reviving Ophelia and Girl Power, as they have come to be known, fail to examine key questions including how "girls marginalized by race, gender, class, age, and sexuality experience girlhood" (2013: 36). In it, Brown critiques two prominent discourses in girlhood studies that were developed in the 1990s by Mary Pipher with her notion of the adolescent girl-at-risk in Reviving Ophelia (1994) and Marnina Gonick with her notion of girl power in Between 'Girl Power' and 'Reviving Ophelia': Constituting the Neoliberal Girl Subject (2006). (2017), black girlhood studies traces its founding as a named site of study to Ruth Nicole Brown's Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy (2009). Some of Shange's work can be read as imaginative explorations of the nuances of black girlhood and thus inform the field of black girlhood studies. Since at least the first presentation in December 1974 of her now famous choreopoem, "for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf" (hereafter "for colored girls"), Shange's writing has celebrated a range of black girls' songs in ways that allowed complex representations of black girlhood to be "born & handled warmly" (1977: 4) on the stage and on the page. She learned early on what it meant to be a black girl under the scrutiny and attack of white supremacy in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
Board of Education era and experienced firsthand the anti-black racism that was a hallmark of that initial stage of integrated schooling. Shange was also a school-age girl of the Brown vs. Dubois, Dizzy Gillespie, Chuck Berry, and Miles Davis. Shange and her younger sister were raised in an upper-middle-class black community where their childhood included experiencing visits to their family home by some of the era's premier black artists and scholars such as W.E.B. She changed her name in 1971, choosing two isiZulu words, ntozake which means she who comes with her own things and shange which means one who walks like a lion (McLarin 1994). Ntozake Shange was an African-American feminist, poet, dramatist, author, dancer, and choreographer whose work answered her own call to "sing a black girl's song" (1977: 4).
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