Blackly World Construction: Curricular Un/Makings and the Grammar of Black Joy

• In Event: Black Educational Futurism as Praxis: Re/membering Through the Curation of Black Intellectual Lineage

Abstract

I advance Black worldmaking as both an ontological praxis and a radical curricular intervention. I ask: What does it mean for Black life to inform the creation of Black worlds within systems of education structurally committed to suppressing it? I discuss how Black youth, via their aesthetic practices (how they dress, speak, move, create, and protest—as well as how they perceive themselves through race-conscious interiority), actively build curricular worlds that exceed and unsettle the violences intended to confine their Black cultural sensibilities. These perceptual and expressive acts of world assemblage, how Black youth come to see themselves through a raced world and respond to it, are theorized as dynamic sites of curricular innovation.

I root this inquiry in critical Black curriculum studies (Author, 2021), particularly the concept of curricular un/makings (Author, 2021), which explores how Black youth repurpose and rebuild classroom spaces to lessen the impacts of racial harm. Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s (2016) notion of the weather, I conceptualize antiblackness as an atmospheric totality—historically inaugurated but structurally ongoing. Within this weather, Black worldmaking takes shape; both opposing the storm of antiblackness and emerging as life through it. Sharpe’s (2016) metaphor, coupled with Black curriculum theories, sharpens my claim that Blackness generates livable worlds in geographies meant to erase Black humanity.

I use autotheoretical narrative as both method and resistance, engaging personal experience as anecdote and theory. My writing, informed by Black aesthetic thought within and beyond educational scholarship, resists disembodied academic protocols, embracing a methodology (McKittrick, 2022) that is affective and insurgent (Spillers, 2003; Carter, 2013). The insights offered emerge from lived and cultural texts–childhood memories, participation in cultural organizations, schooling, and family life–a decade of empirical research with Black youth, and my life in the spatial politics of growing up and teaching in Black enclaves within an anti-Black world. These materials are read critically alongside Black studies scholarship to reveal the aesthetic labors through which Black
communities craft alternative cartographies of existence. The insights I share are drawn primarily from a synthesis of Black youth’s aesthetic artifacts layered on to my Black life as an aesthetic text. Together, they offer a storying of expressivities that reveal how we negotiate identity within marginalizing spaces.
I argue that Black worldmaking constitutes a curricular intervention, asserting itself within and despite the limitations of anti-Black schooling. A key insight from my work is the theorization of a grammar of Black joy as a mode of cultural production that sustains Black life. This joy precedes and exceeds violence. Though educational institutions rarely cultivate such joy, Black communities–and by extension Black students–enact their own curriculum through lived practices of Black expression.

Ultimately, this paper calls for a reorientation of curriculum theory itself, recognizing the intellectual and affective productions of Black students as foundational to any liberatory education future. In dialogue with the 2026 AERA theme, my work emphasizes that worldmaking carries the weight of generational memory and the power of futurity.

Author

• Justin A. Coles, University of Massachusetts - Amherst