American Journal of Play

Ethnomusicologist Kyra D. Gaunt studies gender justice and music as violence against girls through song, scholarship, and social media. Her first book, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, won the 2007 Alan Merriam Prize in Ethnomusicology, which contributed to the emergence of hip-hop music studies, Black girlhood studies, and hip-hop feminism. She began her latest project by asking in what kinds of play do girls engage on YouTube. Her findings will constitute her next book, tentatively titled PLAYED: Music as an Instrument of Violence against Black Girls on YouTube. Key words: Black girlhood studies; Black musical identity; double Dutch rope play; ethnomusicology; kinetic orality

Yla Eason is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers University where she teaches business communications and marketing. She has directed learning and development for the R/GA digital advertising agency and the Center for Excellence in Advertising at Howard University and lectured at the business school at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York (CUNY). In 1985 she founded the multicultural toy company Olmec Toys and has earned numerous awards, including the U. S. Business Enterprise Trust Award in 1996 and the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce’s Alice H. Parker Women Leaders in Innovation Award in 2020. In this interview, Eason describes how she founded and ran her trailblazing company. Key words: diversity and toys; marketing toys; Olmec Toys; toy design; toy industry, Sun-Man

The author examines the childhood experiences of formerly enslaved children. He suggests that the conventional understandings of scholars and histo- rians concerning play may not be applicable to the complex lives of enslaved children because researchers do not consider such children as always propertied beings. Their play practices were molded by their proximity to violence and by their being owned as property. Rethinking what constitutes play for enslaved children, Harris asserts, unlocks newer possibilities for understanding the behaviors, actions, and desires of these children. Their play practices allowed them to learn about—and challenge—their place in the world. Building on and challenging seminal scholarship, Harris encourages readers to rethink what constitutes play and to view ordinary forms of play as intentional attacks against the institution of slavery and white supremacy. Key words: enslaved children and play; slavery and play; white gaze

Traditionally, Black communities have used humor to talk back to those in power while avoiding what the author calls “the dominant gaze.” She argues that Black humor acts as a resistance, especially when considered through the lens of play. Drawing from cultural play literature, critical race studies, and the literature about Black humor, she considers two related case studies based on the hashtags #PermitPatty and #Karen to explore the response of Black people to white femininity. The first case concerns the circulation of the phrase “Permit Patty” in response to a white woman who called the police against a young Black girl for selling water on the sidewalk. The second details the use of the name “Karen” online, highlighting how white women align themselves with police to oppress African Americans. The author concludes that Black online users deploy elements of humor, such as the omniscient narrator and inverse stereotyping, to call attention to this reliance of white womanhood on the police state, often at the expense of Black and Brown people, and children in particular. Key words: Black humor; culture of dominance; double consciousness; Karen; Permit Patty; resistance

The author argues that Black female figures disrupt the normative constructions of genre and gender in narrative-based costumed pretend play and turns body spectatorship into new narratives of speculation. For Black women at play, she asserts, cosplay (i.e., comic book and pop culture costume play) and masquerade (i.e., as during Caribbean Carnival) are rhetorical and performative cognates. She suggests that Black women at play highlight the paradoxical dilemma of their visibility and invisibility so that, in public (whether virtual or actual), their presence becomes a phenomenological experience and political expression of their capacity as world builders. She finds that, because the category of “Black women” in this research includes people who use an array of binary, nonbinary, and contested gender categories, Black femme praxis addresses the complex relations of the real and fictive worlds their play inhabits. To demonstrate the overlap between cosplay and playing mas (masquerade), she includes excerpts from interviews with science-fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, cultural theorist Emily Zobel Marshall, and content from various Black female cosplayers on social media. Key words: belonging; Black femme; cosplay; dissemblance; playing mas (masquerade); social media; world building

Contemporary academic work focused on today’s “board game renaissance” often examines what Stewart Woods (2012), in his book Eurogames, calls hobby board games—“radically different” games that have “evolved outside of the mass market” or are considered “specialist” (p. 20). This is, perhaps, not surprising, given that any academic field (especially ones like game or media studies; see my own 2021 Board Games as Media) concentrates on exemplars that reflect key advances in the field rather than more popular fare: for example, we write about the TV series Mad Men as television par excellence instead of Two and a Half Men as television par common. Is it any wonder that hobby games like Catan or Pandemic become fodder for new academic work on board games? They demonstrate groundbreaking game play and exemplify the field.