here, have some Joy......James
“What happens when, instead of becoming enraged and shocked every time a black person is killed in the United States, we recognize black death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy? What will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least consider) that the very notion of justice-indeed the gamut of political and cognitive elements that constitute formal, multiracial democratic practices and institutions-produces or requires black exclusion and death as normative?”
— Joy James and Joao Costa Vargas, “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs,” Pursuing Trayvon Martin, George Yancy, Janine Jones, eds., Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2012. p. 193
and you know, it’s not that I think joy (the emotion, the supposedly radical version of it speicifcally) is useless, or that at can’t be anti-oppressive at best. it’s just that, as Saidiya Hartman points out, even the slave’s joy fell under the master’s prerogative, it’s just that I think it’s important to ask to whom is this joy useful, and to what ends?
"Historical political imprisonment, black suffering, and death have become familiar, forming a backdrop to everyday reality. Premature violent death and captivity cease to astonish or seem unusual in this landscape. They no longer register as political phenomena. Consequently, when suffering blacks and their rare militant allies break into rebellion, most people seem surprised and outraged. They seem less disturbed by the repression, which they accept in resignation or complicity, and more by the resistance.
According to the state, no suffering warrants rebellion; although "freedom from tyranny" is one of its hallmark phrases. Perhaps what is explicitly meant, but only implied, is that no black suffering warrants rebellion."— Joy James, "Black Suffering in Search of the 'Beloved Community': Political Imprisonment and Self-Defense." Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences 1 (2011). p. 214
the joy experienced by enslaved Afrikans wasn’t enough to end trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, it took a war. it took wars. and in those conditions the Black Joy came in response to moments like massa and missus’s heads being stuck on pikes and left to rot before the smoldering ruins of the plantation.
"The FBI and the CIACs clandestine counterintelligence programs, documented in [Assata] Shakur's memoir and the Freedom Archives documentary "Cointelpro 101," devastated black liberation movements. The long arm of state violence with its international human rights violations extended farthest into black communities to inflict pain on bodies organizing for democratic rights and self-defense in search of the beloved community. In the 1960s, during rebellions against racism, the FBICs counterintelligence program led future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to report the activities of SNCC students as subversive radicals when he worked with the NAACP. FBI agents sent Martin Luther King Jr. anonymous letters suggesting he commit suicide before being exposed as a moral fraud. Through associates and journalists, the FBI influenced republican integrationist Alex Haley while he edited and posthumously completed "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."
We belong to a beloved community that has an extensive police file, and a bottomless bag of dirty tricks historically deployed by the state to foster black suffering reserved especially for it."— Joy James, "Black Suffering in Search of the 'Beloved Community,” p. 217
This next quote isn’t Joy but I think it’s still pretty relevant:
“And he's suggesting that what it means to be a slave is to be subject to a kind of complete appropriation, what you call "property of enjoyment." Your book illustrates the "myriad and nefarious uses of slave property" and then demonstrates how "there was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery" (S, 24). So. Not only are formally enslaved blacks property, but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibility of becoming property is one of the essential elements that draws the line between blackness and whiteness. But what's most intriguing about your argument is the way in which you demonstrate how not only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the property of white enjoyment, but so is — and this is really key — the slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance: that too belongs to white people.”
— Frank Wilderson interviewing Saidiya Hartman, "The Position of the Unthought", Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2003. p. 188
mhhmm mmhmm, so then this moves me to ask: whither the Black Joy that can categorically not be simultaneously enjoyed by our oppressor class? Is it maybe the joy that comes, again, from watching their big houses burn? all the way down to oblivion?
and I mean ALL the way down, baby. maybe that’s what a ~radical~ Black Joy could look something like.