[PDF] The Politics Of Black Joy eBook

Author : Lindsey Stewart
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 42,21 MB
Release : 2021-09-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0810144123

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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.

Author : Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 14,78 MB
Release : 2022-11-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1982176563

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"When writer, Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts wrote a piece for The Washington Post, "My daughter reminded me that black joy is a form of resistance" she had no idea just how much or how widely it would resonate with parents across America. As a Professor of English and Race Studies, and a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of race, trauma and healing, she knew that Black joy is truly a weapon of resistance, a tool for resilience. In the outpouring for more on the subject, Tracey saw there was a need for something longer than a thousand words on the subject"--

Author : Frank B. Wilderson III
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 29,15 MB
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1631496158

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“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

Author : Tera W. Hunter
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 48,93 MB
Release : 1998-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0674893085

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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.

Author : Kevin Quashie
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 143 pages
File Size : 16,39 MB
Release : 2021-02-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1478021322

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In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.

Author : Lindsey Stewart
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 10,34 MB
Release : 2016
Category :
ISBN :

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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.

Author : Eternity Martis
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 29,80 MB
Release : 2021-07-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0771062206

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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.

Author : Christopher Paul Harris
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 49,41 MB
Release : 2023-09-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0691219060

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An incisive portrait of how the new Black politics can forge a future centered on collective action, community, and care When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cry is but one expression of a radical reorientation toward Black politics, protest, and political thought. To Build a Black Future examines the spirit and significance of this insurgency, offering a revelatory account of a new political culture—responsive to pain, suffused with joy, and premised on care—emerging from the centuries-long arc of Black rebellion, a tradition that traces back to the Black slave. Drawing on his own experiences as an activist and organizer, Christopher Paul Harris takes readers inside the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) to chart the propulsive trajectory of Black politics and thought from the Middle Passage to the present historical moment. Carefully attending to the social forces that produce Black struggle and the contradictions that arise within it, Harris illustrates how M4BL gives voice to an abolitionist praxis that bridges the past, present, and future, outlining a political project at once directed inward to the Black community while issuing an outward challenge to the world. Essential reading for the age of #BlackLivesMatter, this visionary and provocative book reveals how the radical politics of joy, pain, and care, in sharp contrast to liberal political thought, can build a Black future that transcends ideology and pushes the boundaries of our political imagination.

Author : Rachel Ricketts
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 17,67 MB
Release : 2021-02-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1982151293

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER San Francisco Chronicle’s 10 Books to Pick * HelloGiggles’ 10 Books to Pick Up for a Better 2021 * PopSugar’s 23 Exciting New Books * Book Riot’s 12 Essential Books About Black Identity and History * Harper’s Bazaar’s 60+ Books You Need to Read in 2021 “A clear, powerful, direct, wise, and extremely helpful treatise on how to combat and heal from the ubiquitous violence of white supremacy” (Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author) from thought leader, racial justice educator, and acclaimed spiritual activist Rachel Ricketts. Do Better is a revolutionary offering that addresses racial justice from a comprehensive, intersectional, and spirit-based perspective. This actionable guidebook illustrates how to engage in the heart-centered and mindfulness-based practices that will help us all fight white supremacy from the inside out, in our personal lives and communities alike. It is a loving and assertive call to do the deep—and often uncomfortable—inner work that precipitates much-needed external and global change. Filled with carefully curated soulcare activities—such as guided meditations and transformative breathwork—“Do Better answers prayers that many have prayed. Do Better offers a bold possibility for change and healing. Do Better offers a deeply sacred choice that we must all make at such a time as this” (Iyanla Vanzant, New York Times bestselling author).

Author : adrienne maree brown
Publisher : AK Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 28,18 MB
Release : 2019-03-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1849353271

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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!