Black Woman Insighting Future Vision: Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb as a Site of Liberatory Knowledge Production

ABSTRACT

Situating a poetry performance as a form of autoperformance, I analyze the first National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, Amanda Gorman’s 2021 Presidential inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, to discuss the poet’s subjectivity as a young Black woman who invites her audience to be active agents for social change and pursuers of positive peace. I position Gorman’s poem as a narrative, containing life-giving ideologies including Afrocentricity, Black Feminist Thought/Black Feminist Rhetoric, and Coalition Building, capable of calling her audience into being the protagonists to bring about a liberatory future that recognizes their individual agency as Americans.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetry
• autoperformance
• black feminist
• coalition building
• constitutive rhetoric

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Akie Fukushige Wenk

Akie Fukushige Wenk is a postdoctoral teaching faculty in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. Akie embraces an interdisciplinary approach to her scholarship, and her research interests range from decolonial scholarship to liberatory pedagogy and rhetoric of race to interracial friendships.