Next week (Thursday 2/18) I’d like us to brainstorm about the final group project for this class. In light of Professor Regine Jean-Charles’s inspiring invocation of Ntozake Shange and call to be curators of (black) joy, I want us to think about the ways in which our final project might be able to rigorously think and intensely celebrate the sensory material of black joy.
Some things to ponder for next week’s discussion:
How might we engage the literature in this course (all of which except for Stowe are black authored texts), to consider the sensible presence of black joy?
Inversely how might thinking about the explicit and implicit sensory material in these texts help us to sense, feel, and imagine black joy alongside the necessity of thinking black pain?
What form could our final project take that would allow us to not only rigorously study but also intensely share the matter and modes of black joy at play in these texts? How can sharing and celebrating this black joy influence our community? (A question which of course would mean we would also need to identify what or which community we want to influence.)