Unspeakable Joy: Anti-Black Constraint, Loopholes of Retreat, and the Practice of Black Joy

Abstract

This manuscript thinks with Harriet Jacobs; I am concerned with the otherwise worlds, the productions of Black Joy that Black people devise while in the crawlspace, understood here as higher education contexts. Whereas the condition of Black life is in an antagonistic relationship with society, I ask, what is the sound, look, and feeling of Black Joy? Unspeakable joy, or what I define as the praxes of interior elaboration, cramped creation, and otherwise imagining, are loopholes for Black people to extricate the self from untenable antagonisms and harboring spaces to plot, envision, and realize fuller lives on their terms.