“AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM”: (Re)turning and Cultivating Black Joy in the Group Chat

• In Event: A (Re)membering Renaissance: Black Sisterhood, Academia, and Possibilities

Abstract

Beyonce's Renaissance album was released on July 29, 2022, just two days before our return to the U.S. from Ghana. As we prepared to come home from our month-long trip, we lamented over the Queen Bey’s album as we packed our belongings. All doctoral candidates at our respective universities in New York City and Georgia, we immediately had to (re)orient our interior selves (Alexander, 2004). Previously troubled some 30 days earlier by our proximity to whiteness upon leaving the U.S., we grew especially accustomed to the absence of white fragility, white rage, and the despondency we felt toward state violence and anti-Blackness racism before our arrival to “the continent.” While we had all recognized and understood how colonization permeated the materiality of our brothers and sisters in Ghana, the culture and aesthetic through which we experienced this predominantly Black country was palpable. In Ghana, we experienced Black Joy, but not as resistance (Walker, 2011). As scholar and philosopher Lindsey Stewart (2021) argues in her analysis of Zora Neale Hurston's essays, "joy" emphasizes "a flourishing" relationship "of the self to the self (or, in the case of Black joy, how Black folks relate to each other)" (p. 9). In Ghana, Black joy was ours.

In the United States, Black joy is a politics of refusal that we marshal across the water, in order to move toward the phinish line (Lindsey, 2021). As McKittrick (2006) posits, “Black geographic togetherness and community ties also identify, for example, the sociocultural pull away from what bell hooks describe as terrifying and deathly representations of whiteness…” (p. 13). Our friendship is our togetherness propelling us through the confines of the academy as we steadily approach the conclusion of our journeys as students, while also navigating and inhabiting our bodies as Afro-diasporic women and a multitude of other identities. Consequently, flourishing, as opposed to merely surviving, is contingent on our politics of refusal and our capacity to apply what we learned in Ghana. According to Dillard (2016), “[w]e feel joy when we feel visible and heard. We feel joy when we feel respected. We feel joy when we feel whole” (p. 113). I feel joy when Author 3, sends affirmations. I feel respected when Author 1 carves out time to talk. I feel whole as we (re)member and write with one another and work to think critically about what academia is and how we work through and around its complexities– together. Within the confines of academia, this joy/ our joy is a politics of refusal, which we cherish. It is also as surrealist Blues poet Aja Monet (2016) refers to it “a methodology of the oppressed and a liberating force to be reckoned with” (n.p.). Our joy undergirds our commitment to the possibilities through which we seek to create space for the past, present, and future Black women scholars whose work has and will help us to (re)envision an education worthy of the Black children.

Author

• Damaris C. Dunn, Drexel University