The Politics of Black Joy

The Politics of Black Joy PDF Author: Lindsey Stewart
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144123
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
During the antebellum period, slave owners weaponized southern Black joy to argue for enslavement, propagating images of “happy darkies.” In contrast, abolitionists wielded sorrow by emphasizing racial oppression. Both arguments were so effective that a political uneasiness on the subject still lingers. In The Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart wades into these uncomfortable waters by analyzing Zora Neale Hurston’s uses of the concept of Black southern joy. Stewart develops Hurston’s contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neo-abolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death. To develop the politics of joy, Stewart draws upon Zora Neale Hurston’s essays, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and figures across several disciplines including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Imani Perry, Eddie Glaude, and Audra Simpson. The politics of joy offers insights that are crucial for forming needed new paths in our current moment. For those interested in examining popular conceptions of Black political agency at the intersection of geography, gender, class, and Black spirituality, The Politics of Black Joy is essential reading.

The Politics of Black Joy

The Politics of Black Joy PDF Author: Lindsey Stewart
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144123
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the antebellum period, slave owners weaponized southern Black joy to argue for enslavement, propagating images of “happy darkies.” In contrast, abolitionists wielded sorrow by emphasizing racial oppression. Both arguments were so effective that a political uneasiness on the subject still lingers. In The Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart wades into these uncomfortable waters by analyzing Zora Neale Hurston’s uses of the concept of Black southern joy. Stewart develops Hurston’s contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neo-abolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death. To develop the politics of joy, Stewart draws upon Zora Neale Hurston’s essays, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and figures across several disciplines including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Imani Perry, Eddie Glaude, and Audra Simpson. The politics of joy offers insights that are crucial for forming needed new paths in our current moment. For those interested in examining popular conceptions of Black political agency at the intersection of geography, gender, class, and Black spirituality, The Politics of Black Joy is essential reading.

Black Joy

Black Joy PDF Author: Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982176555
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A timely collection of deeply personal, uplifting, and powerful essays that celebrate the redemptive strength of Black joy--in the vein of Black Girls Rock, You Are Your Best Thing, and I Really Needed This Today. When Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts wrote an essay on Black joy for The Washington Post, she had no idea just how deeply it would resonate. But the outpouring of responses affirmed her own lived experience: that Black joy is not just a weapon of resistance, it is a tool for resilience. With this book, Tracey aims to gift her community with a collection of lyrical essays about the way joy has evolved, even in the midst of trauma, in her own life. Detailing these instances of joy in the context of Black culture allows us to recognize the power of Black joy as a resource to draw upon, and to challenge the one-note narratives of Black life as solely comprised of trauma and hardship. Black Joy is a collection that will recharge you. It is the kind of book that is passed between friends and offers both challenge and comfort at the end of a long day. It is an answer for anyone who needs confirmation that they are not alone and a brave place to quiet their mind and heal their soul.

Afropessimism

Afropessimism PDF Author: Frank B. Wilderson III
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631496158
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
“Wilderson’s thinking teaches us to believe in the miraculous even as we decry the brutalities out of which miracles emerge”—Fred Moten Praised as “a trenchant, funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy” (Aaron Robertson,?Literary Hub), Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism arrived at a moment when protests against police brutality once again swept the nation. Presenting an argument we can no longer ignore, Wilderson insists that we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of memoir, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit.“Wilderson’s ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. . . . Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity.”—Paul C. Taylor, Washington Post

To ÕJoy My Freedom

To ÕJoy My Freedom PDF Author: Tera W. Hunter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674893085
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.

They Said This Would Be Fun

They Said This Would Be Fun PDF Author: Eternity Martis
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771062206
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner of the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Nonfiction Nominated for the Evergreen Award A powerful, moving memoir about what it's like to be a student of colour on a predominantly white campus. A booksmart kid from Toronto, Eternity Martis was excited to move away to Western University for her undergraduate degree. But as one of the few Black students there, she soon discovered that the campus experiences she'd seen in movies were far more complex in reality. Over the next four years, Eternity learned more about what someone like her brought out in other people than she did about herself. She was confronted by white students in blackface at parties, dealt with being the only person of colour in class and was tokenized by her romantic partners. She heard racial slurs in bars, on the street, and during lectures. And she gathered labels she never asked for: Abuse survivor. Token. Bad feminist. But, by graduation, she found an unshakeable sense of self--and a support network of other women of colour. Using her award-winning reporting skills, Eternity connects her own experience to the systemic issues plaguing students today. It's a memoir of pain, but also resilience.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The Pursuit of Happiness PDF Author: Bianca C. Williams
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In The Pursuit of Happiness Bianca C. Williams traces the experiences of African American women as they travel to Jamaica, where they address the perils and disappointments of American racism by looking for intimacy, happiness, and a connection to their racial identities. Through their encounters with Jamaican online communities and their participation in trips organized by Girlfriend Tours International, the women construct notions of racial, sexual, and emotional belonging by forming relationships with Jamaican men and other "girlfriends." These relationships allow the women to exercise agency and find happiness in ways that resist the damaging intersections of racism and patriarchy in the United States. However, while the women require a spiritual and virtual connection to Jamaica in order to live happily in the United States, their notion of happiness relies on travel, which requires leveraging their national privilege as American citizens. Williams's theorization of "emotional transnationalism" and the construction of affect across diasporic distance attends to the connections between race, gender, and affect while highlighting how affective relationships mark nationalized and gendered power differentials within the African diaspora.

Pleasure Activism

Pleasure Activism PDF Author: adrienne maree brown
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849353271
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

The Politics of Joy

The Politics of Joy PDF Author: Lindsey Stewart
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Many scholars have long charged Zora Neale Hurston of naiveté when of racism, romanticism of region, and valorization of the folk. While black feminists have rescued Hurston via her gender and sexual politics (black love is political), they have done so largely by divorcing her thoughts on race from this position. However, this dissertation revives Hurston's position on black liberation politics by introducing the concept called "the politics of joy," which recovers the interplay of race, gender, class, region, and religion in Hurston's critique of contemporary black leadership. Development of this concept is a contribution to black feminism, intersectionality studies, African American and Africana philosophy, and social political philosophy through its implications on concepts of race, gender, sexuality, class, and agency. To develop this concept, this dissertation will draw upon a range of historical figures (W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Richard Wright, John Dewey); a significant portion of the corpus of Hurston's work (letters, memoirs, essays, and folklore material); black feminist thinkers and contemporary philosophers (Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Cornel West, Angela Davis, Eddie Glaude, Saba Mahmood, Michel Foucault); and cultural work (past and current) done on hoodoo/Voodoo ( Kamelaah Martin, Katrina Hazzard-Buzzard, Jeffery Anderson). Through an analysis of Hurston's folklore material on religion, this dissertation will demonstrate how black liberation politics is often classed gendered, classed, and regionalized. With hoodoo/Voodoo material as a case study, this dissertation will show that concepts of agency need to be expanded beyond the register of resistance: for there are practices which cultivate resistance but cannot be read as simply resistance. Moreover, this dissertation will show that joy is political in two senses. Not only does representation of joy (i.e. folklore) in black life reveal intra-group tensions, but it also, in a deeper sense, addresses a dimension of black liberation that resistance cannot.

Dear Black Girl

Dear Black Girl PDF Author: Tamara Winfrey Harris
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1523092300
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
“Dear Black Girl is the empowering, affirming love letter our girls need in order to thrive in a world that does not always protect, nurture, or celebrate us. This collection of Black women's voices… is a must-read, not only for Black girls, but for everyone who cares about Black girls, and for Black women whose inner-Black girl could use some healing.” –Tarana Burke, Founder of the ‘Me Too' Movement "Dear Dope Black Girl, You don't know me, but I know you. I know you because I am you! We are magic, light, and stars in the universe.” So begins a letter that Tamara Winfrey Harris received as part of her Letters to Black Girls project, where she asked black women to write honest, open, and inspiring letters of support to young black girls aged thirteen to twenty-one. Her call went viral, resulting in a hundred personal letters from black women around the globe that cover topics such as identity, self-love, parents, violence, grief, mental health, sex, and sexuality. In Dear Black Girl, Winfrey Harris organizes a selection of these letters, providing “a balm for the wounds of anti-black-girlness” and modeling how black women can nurture future generations. Each chapter ends with a prompt encouraging girls to write a letter to themselves, teaching the art of self-love and self-nurturing. Winfrey Harris's The Sisters Are Alright explores how black women must often fight and stumble their way into alrightness after adulthood. Dear Black Girl continues this work by delivering pro-black, feminist, LGBTQ+ positive, and body positive messages for black women-to-be—and for the girl who still lives inside every black woman who still needs reminding sometimes that she is alright.

Joy Unspeakable

Joy Unspeakable PDF Author: Barbara A. Holmes
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506421628
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Joy Unspeakable focuses on the aspects of the Black church that point beyond particular congregational gatherings toward a mystical and communal spirituality not within the exclusive domain of any denomination. This mystical aspect of the black church is deeply implicated in the well-being of African American people but is not the focus of their intentional reflection. Moreover, its traditions are deeply ensconced within the historical memory of the wider society and can be found in Coltrane's riffs, Malcolm's exhortations, the social activism of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. The research in this book-through oral histories, church records, and written accounts--details not only ways in which contemplative experience is built into African American collective worship but also the legacy of African monasticism, a history of spiritual exemplars, and unique meditative worship practices. A groundbreaking work in its original edition, Joy Unspeakable now appears in a new, revised edition to address the effects of this contemplative tradition on activism and politics and to speak to a new generation of readers and scholars.