Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research

Book excerpt: This research-based book foregrounds Black narrative traditions and honors alternative methods of data collection, analysis, and representation. Toliver presents a semi-fictionalized narrative in an alternative science fiction setting, refusing white-centric qualitative methods and honoring the ways of the griots who were the scholars of their African nations. By utilizing Black storytelling, Afrofuturism, and womanism as an onto-epistemological tool, this book asks readers to elevate Black imaginations, uplift Black dreams, and consider how Afrofuturity is qualitative futurity. By centering Black girls, the book considers the ethical responsibility of researchers to focus upon the words of our participants, not only as a means to better understand our historic and current world, but to better situate inquiry for what the future world and future research could look like. Ultimately, this book decenters traditional, white-centered qualitative methods and utilizes Afrofuturism as an onto-epistemological tool and ethical premise. It asks researchers to consider how we move forward in data collection, data analysis, and data representation by centering how Black girls reclaim and recover the past, counter negative and elevate positive realities that exist in the present, and create new possibilities for the future. The semi-fictionalized narrative of the book highlights the intricate methodological and theoretical work that undergirds the story. It will be an important text for both new and seasoned researchers interested in social justice. Informed and anti-racist researchers will find Endarkened storywork a useful tool for educational, cultural, and social critiques now and in the future.