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.
Keywords
Under the threat of suffocation, Harriet Jacobs dwelled in a crawlspace for 7 years, with little space to maneuver her body. Recalling the crawlspace of confinement, a small shed in her grandmother's house, Jacobs records how the antebellum soundscape engendered thoughts of wonder, terror, and joy: Morning came. I knew it only by the noises I heard, for in my small den, day and night were all the same. I suffered for air even more than for light. But I was not comfortless. I heard the voices of my children. There was joy in the sound. It made my tears flow- how
I longed to see them! I was eager to look on their faces (Jacobs, 1987, p. 69).
One might understand Jacob's withdrawal to the crawlspace as a radical act of giving and withholding (Brooks, 2006).
Antebellum politics and, so too, the afterlife of slavery legitimate carceral logics to monitor the space, time, energy, and movement of Black liveliness and living. Here, Jacobs's Black presence in the anti-Black social sphere was already in violation such that withholding was essential for survival. However, in the activity of withholding (wholly or partially), there was the occasion for joy. Jacobs's unspeakable joy was motivated by love, recognizable in the “noises,” desire for, and imaging of her children.
This manuscript thinks with Jacobs; I am concerned with the otherwise worlds, which is to say, productions of Black Joy that Black people aestheticize while in the crawlspace, understood here as higher education contexts. I theorize on the belief that traditional logics of inquiry that rely on linguistic practices of articulation cannot wholly consider how confinement always and already structures language and being. Black Joy compels a set of questions attuned to the senses.
While Black Joy, perhaps, should best be understood as unspeakable and elasticity of expression, which is to say, incapable of being bounded by linear conceptualizations, I pursue an affective approximation by considering how joy reveals itself in confinement. Broadly, I ask, where higher education contexts function as sites of carceral logic that, generally, are inimical to that which is Black, what is the sound, look, and feeling of Black Joy? More specifically, I attend to the affective register, asking what is heard, felt, and seen from the position of confinement.
As Spillers (1987) instructed, I assume that overdetermined properties mark Black being in the United States. The work of speaking a more accurate, or what might read as a more profound, meditation on self demands that Black people “strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of [our] inventiveness” (p. 65). In this “stripping down,” I read an urgency to locate the possible, which is to say, Black Joy, “in the tiny, often minuscule chinks and crevices of what appears to be the inescapable web of capture” (Campt, 2017, p. 16). To accomplish this, I listen to images (Campt, 2017). That is, I sit with Jacobs, aesthetically attuning to the attic space as she experienced it to meditate on the possibilities of Black Joy. I conclude with recommendations for educators and practitioners to create environments that afford opportunities for Black students to affirm the affective capacities of Black Joy as a present way of being to direct Black futures.
In doing so, I come alongside critical research projects on higher education that fundamentally interrogate historically white institutions (e.g., Dancy et al., 2018; Patton, 2016), and, more specifically, those that offer theoretical contributions on matters of agency. Whereas historically white institutions can be understood as institutions that are not rooted in Black governance formations, theorizing the interiority of Black Joy, as I do here, is relevant for any setting outside of Black governance formations, K-12, urbanicity, and beyond. In what follows, I begin with a review of literature to contextualize the interiority of joy over and against an anti-Black public sphere that surveils Black sound and expression. From there, I discuss my theoretical frame and methods as a lead into my analysis of Jacobs’ imagery.
Regarding Joy: A Review
Educational research and methods tend to depend on cognitively reasoned and articulated expressions of a concept. These traditional protocols, while helpful, may inadvertently construct joy as something with a precise shape and specific formulation. Thus, in order to think with Jacobs and approach the notion of unspeakable joy as she understood it, the review opens with an interdisciplinary review that works to understand the nuance of joy as it concerns Black people and the public sphere and, in doing so, exceeds definitions of joy in educational research.
These analyses are after a closer approximation that theorizes with nonfiction literature and the conceptual, attempting to raise Black thought as a traceable canon beyond the regulated categorization of social science empiricism. Secondly, this review assumes that such conceptualizing has implications for Black liveliness and living in the contemporary moment and future. On this premise, Black thought has the potential, as it always has, to inform theorizing, and theory- and method- making, and exists beyond the ownership of academic politics. I begin with a review of the public sphere.
The Public Sphere and Counterpublic Expression
Theorizing the public through enlightenment logic, Calhoun (1993) considered the public an historical construct that privileges types of participation. On the basis that publicness, or one's interaction with the public sphere, is akin to agency and liberal versions of freedom, the presumption of participation in the public sphere parallels what it means to be a full citizen. This overrepresentation implies that publicness constitutes subjectivity and that all members of society are equipped with the social and political authority to move through the world with free will. Otherwise stated, every selfhood as the expressive and articulate subject is available to everyone. Definitively, Blackness complicates this ideal version of citizen and human. In the racialized United States, social imaginary (see Spillers, 1987; Wynter, 2003), conceptualizations of the citizen rely on one's ability to imagine themselves as the universal ideal, or in a proximate relationship with whiteness. Blackness, thus, is an affront to enlightenment logic. As such, Black students exist in a structurally antagonistic relationship with the public sphere, which I understand here as higher education contexts (Dancy et al., 2018; Wilder, 2013). Furthermore, as Black students encounter anti-Black public spheres, their experiences in the classroom, social, and living spaces enforce a sense of unbelonging and out of placeness. Enlightenment, in this way, was a project of exclusion by inclusion, bringing erratic thinking, being, theology, and philosophy under control.
Furthermore, enlightenment logic has been deployed in higher education contexts as a technology of racialized surveillance (Jenkins et al., 2021; Solórzano et al., 2000) that functions to control movement and expression, while creating racialized experiences for Black students (Smith et al., 2002; Smith et al., 2011). For example, sound and the more general soundscape, what is heard and how it is heard in a particular location, were causes of theological and philosophical debate (Crawley, 2017). In enlightenment terms, to consider Black people as part of the soundscape, noise-producing figures in a particular location, was to understand them as an object of aversion to the public and in need of control.
In education spaces, scholars have discussed the ways this logic targets Black girls’ behavior (Brown, 2009; Nyachae & Ohito, 2023) and, more broadly, the negative perceptions of campus climate as experienced by Black students (Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Solórzano et al., 2000). In other ways, whiteness teaches Black people in higher education contexts to police and mute their noise making as an extension of carceral logics (Okello, 2022). Nevertheless, though perpetually objectified, Black people emit noise- a marker of living, communication, and sociality- in the public sphere beyond the parameters of enlightenment thought, participating in culture, creation, and memory in ways that bring joy into view. One angle to understand this praxis is through counterpublics and the Black aesthetic tradition.
Scholars have argued against the exclusivity of the human ideal and pointed to counterpublics that effectively work for and on behalf of minoritized folks, lifting ideals and subjectivities that are often delegitimated if not erased in the hegemonic public sphere (Calhoun, 1993; Ohito & Brown, 2021; Rios, 2020). Blackness troubles the public sphere and, in doing so, is a site for counterpublics. Therein, Black aesthetic formations are instantiations of the counterpublic, a critique of the order of knowledge that rids Black people of human diction and possibility; they illustrate the force of aesthetic practices as a departure from the western social imaginary.
Moreover, Black aesthetics are a challenge to framing the world as a sociopolitical and economic matrix rooted in exploitation. Black aesthetics reflect a way of “sounding out” and “rehearsing” modes of affective production that refuse enlightenment logic by using “melodic irruption and irreducible noise” (Crawley, 2017, p. 145). Whereas enlightenment created subjects through containment and enclosure, Black aesthetics create openings for life against normative conceptions of being. Asserting Black life and living through multiple and varied aesthetics is a fundamental claim about Blackness and Black folks’ capacity for something called joy (McClendon & Okello, 2021). Black aesthetics, broadly understood, are explicated as sites of love and affirmation that include Black cultural centers, Black studies spaces, Black curriculum affinity groups, and Black Greek letter organizations (Harney & Moten, 2013; Patton, 2006).
While notions of joy are often attached to forms of Black aesthetic public expression, other critical entry points exist. That is, joy can take on multiple forms. Tethering joy to publicness is a failure and disavowal of joy as otherwise manifestations, namely, the possibilities of the intimate.
The Black Interior—Quiet
As mentioned above, the United States social imaginary often links Blackness and publicness (Quashie, 2009). In this way, instantiations of public expressiveness and resistance operate as the dominant idiom for understanding Black knowing, being, and culture. On this point, Okello et al. (2020) discussed self-defining praxis as an interior process taken up by Black people to negotiate racial battle fatigue in higher education contexts. More specifically, the authors discussed the importance of self-love and dreaming, while Okello and White (2019) meditated on the creative impulses of agency, as interior capacities for negotiating anti-Blackness. Consistent with these themes of interiority, Bonilla-Silva (2019) has theorized the notion of racialized emotions as that which is engendered by a racialized society, and Tichavakunda (2022) has extended the discussion framing Black Joy as “an emotion engendered by a racialized society” (p. 423). While essential for Black being, such an arrangement would have it that expressions of what I am calling interiority would be fixed to resistance.
The logic of indexing Blackness with resistance can be traced to core concepts of Black thought. In Duboisian thought, for example, a sense of doubleness befalls Black people as they attempt to reconcile the force that whiteness projects onto them and the often unelaborated desire to be at one with framings of whiteness in the public sphere. While an in-depth discussion of double consciousness is beyond this analysis's scope, it is imperative in how it understates, if not dismisses, the vagaries of Black interiority. Articulating interiority against the popular idioms of Black expression would require a new language. The presumption of unspeakable joy produces another way of thinking about Blackness in the soundscape. That joy might be unspeakable suggests that what is produced is “vibrated and sounded out, and such vibration and sound is produced from and emerges from within while producing joy” (Crawley, 2017, p. 145). For this reason, Quashie (2009) turns to quiet.
Attempting to wrap expressiveness in a new language, quiet connotes a “sensibility of being as a manner of expression” (Quashie, 2009, p. 333). Suppose Alexander (2004) is correct, and interiority is a “quality of being inward” and a metaphor for creative expression that exceeds “the public face of stereotype and limited imagination” (p. x). In that case, there exists an interior plane of fear, feeling, and desire that is introspective, expansive, and creative, impulsive, and chaotic. The interior, in this way, shifts with the various stimuli one might encounter in the public sphere but is not beholden to resistance or bound indefinitely to the external world, which is to say the interior has its own “ineffable integrity” (Quashie, 2009, p. 334). In its capacity to escape definition, it is meaningful and capable of holding life's essence. More than any other definition, this understanding of the interior makes room for the unspeakable joy that Jacobs offers. Quiet, in its awe and vastness, requires and brings to the fore a contemplate realm that informs Black liveliness and living.
Refusal as Black Joy
There is a danger in limiting the emancipatory imagination to notions of resistance or external agency because doing so elides opportunities to value internal registers of humanity (Stewart, 2021). Foregrounding governance concerns with how Black people relate to one another or what Black people might mean to each other, Stewart (2021) critiqued oppositional relationships that tend to rely on the oppressor and oppressed, suggesting that joy meditates on notions of oneness or the self to the self. Drawing on Lorde's (1984) notion of the erotic, the capacity for joy is encouraged by living from within outward in ways that make one accountable to the self (or self in the community) in the most profound sense.
This framing rests on the idea of joy as relational, a term of relation that requires risk, surrender, and openness and refuses terms imposed outside of the self. Moreover, Black Joy could be said to escape sociological framings that, for Hartman (2019), can never grasp the beautiful struggle, experiments, and alternative modes of life that made way for and defined joy. These terms reckon with what is lost when proscribed notions of joy and living are entrenched as the norm: “the beauty of the Black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise” (p. 33).
Furthermore, refusing inundation accentuates the “extraordinary” and the mundane, art, and every day. Black Joy, like beauty, like art, “is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence” (Hartman, 2019, p. 33). In these wayward terms, Black Joy refuses the master's tools in favor of fugitive maneuvers; it is “cramped creation, the entanglement of escape and confinement, flight and captivity” (p. 227); it loves what is not loved and operates on an insurgent ground where which one might formulate the new experiments in feeling that might direct how to live.
Advanced here is a case for embodied feeling, as Lorde (1984) discussed, where being “is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (p. 54). Lorde continued, proclaiming feeling as knowing, “a self-connection shared that is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling” (p. 57). Thus, embodied feeling can be the affective habitat (Ohito & Brown, 2021; Rios, 2020) for meeting and being met by others, or, as relational, joy is a space where, through encounter, one is remade and becomes more through the relation. Ohito and Brown (2021) elaborated on this notion discussing Black affective networks as “moments when Blackness comes alive in white spaces,” spaces where Black people can be with a degree of freeness. Rios (2020) anchored this feeling of being in an ethics of lived Blackness, or “living fully and visible in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase” (p. 19).
To be clear, I do not disagree with the facticity of anti-Blackness; my departure is an attempt to resituate the terms by which something called joy might exist. Failure to do so runs the risk of narrating Black Joy as nothing more than a symptom of a racialized society—another dislocation. Those terms, returning to Jacobs, do not reduce joy to a set of coping strategies, and, instead, leave room to understand Black Joy as something otherwise.
Black Joy in Education
If higher education contexts persist as sites of anti-Black antagonism for Black people, one must assume that, as a racialized institution (Wilder, 2013), it is also incapable of producing joy as a life-affirming praxis. There must then be a closer examination of spiritual and cosmological productions—joy—that refuse carceral, imprisoning logics that contend for Black students’ spirits. Pursuing joy, thus, is an (un)disciplining, the pursuit of otherwise humanity (Wynter, 2003) and constitutes breaking with the discipline of coloniality and offers one way to reckon with anti-Black logics. Whereas self-love as a relational term (Okello, 2020) involves naming Black self-hatred and its origins as a production of whiteness, locating self-love as the resistance of white supremacist logic, and understanding Black self-love as impossible without engaging in decoloniality. Black Joy as relational may require a similar ethic.
In a study specific to the racialized emotion of Black Joy, Tichavakunda (2021) found Black Joy as being, achievement, and a collective feeling, asking, intently, “to what extent do Black lives matter in educational and sociological research if Black people are not narrating how they experience or overcome oppression” (p. 436). Building on these findings, Black Joy, as often unspeakable, emphasizes Black flesh, and its interactions with various land and soundscapes, as an important site of being. In what follows, I consider Black liveliness and living in anti-Black spaces to understand practices of unspeakable joy.
Theoretical Framework
To imagine futures for Black people is often wrapped up in references to past political and resistance movements. I understand Jacobs's aspiration, however, in the tense of Black feminist futurity, a performance of a future that has not happened. Joy in this register is the press toward the future that one wants to see in the right now present (Campt, 2017). More particularly, Campt (2017) noted that knowing, like Jacobs's predicament, exists in a state of tension, as holding together a complex set of forces, “unvisible motion held in tense suspension or temporary equilibrium” (p. 51). In this way, Jacobs takes up the grammar of futurity as inescapably intertwined with notions of aspiration. Futurity, thus, “is a tense of anteriority” (p. 17), holding on to a complex idea of possibility as quiet, disruptive, subtle, and exacting.
It is relentless and not necessarily intended to be heroic; it is a grammar of the possible that reaches beyond simple questions of the future, such as what the future will be, toward a future real conditional sense that exhumes that which will have had to happen (Campt, 2017). Evidence of these expressions is located in the least likely places. For Jacobs, this unlikely site, the crawlspace, was also what she termed the loophole of retreat.
Making Space for Black Joy
The crawlspace as a material reality was real. As Jacobs (1987) remembered: A small shed had been added to my grandmother's house years ago. Some boards were laid across the joists at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small garret, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. It was a pent roof, covered with nothing but shingles, according to the southern custom for such buildings. The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air. The air was stifling; the darkness was total. (p. 173)
Spatially, readers bear witness to the debilitating, disabling perimeters of a 9’ × 7’ × 3’ cell.
Small peep hole.
In the garret, Jacobs's limbs are numb by inaction; she loses the power of speech; she remains unconscious for 16 hours; Jacobs questions her spiritual beliefs and the seeming indifference of God; “she becomes delirious, and dark thoughts fill her mind” (Jacobs, 1987, pp. 190–191). The same garret that distances her from terror exacts a physical punishment on Jacobs as the geographic realities of slavery produce spatialized boundaries. For 7 years, Jacobs is both held and holds herself captive, neither captured nor free. She is “everywhere and nowhere, north, and south, unvisibily present across the landscape”, in “the last place they thought of” (Jacobs, 1987, p. 42).
Moreover, in the garret, she is “neither able to mother her children nor removed from their lives, neither subject to her master's tyranny nor completely safe from his threats” (GreenBarteet, 2013, p. 54). The material confinement of the crawlspace mimics, for some scholars, the hold of the ship (Wilderson, 2010), whereas Black people are inextricably relegated to sociopolitical death and dying to countenance social order. Civil society never intended to exist alongside or analogously with Black people, as Black people were the antithesis of the human. Nevertheless, joy attends to the largeness that is Black life on the recognition that “even as we experience, recognize, and live subjection, we do not simply or only live in subjection as the subjected” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 8). Black Joy, as modeled by Jacobs is focused on one's “preparedness for encounter rather than on the encounter itself” (Quashie, 2021, p. 21); it represents instances of being and conditions of human knowledge. Said differently, within spatial boundaries, the production of subject knowledge that might subvert regulatory confinement is possible.
Importantly, subject knowledge does not simply emerge, as “even when things are within reach, we still have to reach for those things for them to be reached” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 7). Where there is no air coming because of the garret's constraints, Jacobs maintains fidelity to doing—breathing—to trying, to refusing, to choosing joy. The loophole of retreat, a literal and metaphorical site in the space of confinement, actualized Black Joy. The loophole of retreat was created in the cramped space. The result of finding an overlooked tool, Jacobs (1987) said to herself, “Now I will have some light…I bored three rows of holes, one above another; then I bored out the interstices between. I thus succeeded in making one hole about an inch long and an inch broad” (Jacobs, 1987, p. 175). It is worth remembering that the darkness was total and “oppressive,” wherein “there was no hole, no crack, through which [Jacobs] could peep” (Jacobs, 1987, p. 174). Whatever “light” or “air” to be found, thus, would need to take form in darkness, and in this way, the loophole, a Black aesthetic, self-defining commitment to Black being, makes space for joy as glimpses—smallness, mundane, quotidian, every day—of light, air, and sound. In its broader meaning, the loophole of retreat, as more than an attic space or 1-inch hole, locates a space of possibility within places of impossible constraint, capture, and enclosure. That is, the place of confinement, as taught by Jacobs, is and can be a self-reflexive preparation ground for practices of refusal and rehearsals of freedom, the site through which one might engineer love and connectivity and engender joy from within centers of power.
Where enslavement etched death onto Black bodies and minds, Jacobs offers not answers in practical terms but a world of intimacy that might serve as the foundation for another type of aliveness; here, joy is not constituted or inhabited in transcendence, purified circumstances, or perfection. Instead, she is after a reorientation of what it means to be human by doing and trying. Though relentlessly held, Black people are negotiating how to be in education contexts indefinitely structured by anti-Blackness (Okello, 2022). The loophole of retreat, thus, is a way of attending to Black being that is not reducible to the terror that calls it into existence but is the rich remainder; the loophole is a multifaceted artifact indexed as communal resistance, cultural products and formations, discourses, traditions, aesthetics, and embodiments.
The loophole of retreat made available a space to clarify lived experiences and liberatory desires while situated in and by the force of anti-Black disregard. In the spaces of temporary and imprecise refusal, Jacobs bore holes in the garret to allow for menial amounts of air and to observe her general surroundings. Through the small peeping holes, the embodied senses were both the site and resource for joy while living in the throes of terror as Jacobs engaged in listening, feeling, and seeing her immediate surroundings. In like manner, the loophole of retreat in this manuscript is concerned with the ways Black students might take up Black Joy as discrete, slight, and imperceptible to the uninitiated. Theorizing the loophole suggests that a fuller reading of Black Joy is layered and multifaceted, which is to say created in and by, embodied expansiveness, often unspeakable.
Methodology
This manuscript attends to formations of Black Joy untethered from the rigid, classificatory constraints of traditional approaches to qualitative research. Attempting to define a concept like joy already toes the line of shrinking its expansive, ungovernable nature, and, therefore, I proceed cautiously so as not to reduce the prophetic sensibilities of joy to a set of actions and protocols. For this study, I conduct an aesthetic analysis (Fenner, 2003; Silverman, 2001) of imagery engendered by Jacobs. That is, in my close reading (Durham, 2014; Henderson, 1989; Smith, 1979) of Jacobs's narrative, I analyze the imagery that she produced through writing. In this way, I am utilizing imagery to offer a reading of joy beyond that which is spoken or transcribed.
Here, critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008), which used individual words to construct images, intends to produce data authentic to individual and community experiences, as it simultaneously rejects social science practices directed by rationality and objectivity. Grounded in lived experiences, projects that draw directly on personal narratives, while incomplete, can create new ways of seeing, being, and understanding the world, and initiate dialogue on important issues (Hartman, 2008).
An aesthetic analysis is the careful review and investigation of aesthetic qualities that belong to a particular unit of analysis, that, in turn, provoke, an aesthetic response or experience.
That is, how one aesthetically encounters the unit of analysis, its organization, and the ways it is experienced perceptually, generates thoughts and feelings associated with, and extending beyond the object. Here, sensuous and sensory aspects of a unit of analysis come to the fore that consider harmony, grace, excess, order, simplicity, grandeur, and garishness (Fenner, 2003; Silverman, 2001). These aspects engage the senses and are depictions of aesthetic qualities such as the lines, proportion, and colors of an object. Second, aesthetic analysis considers association, which involves imaginative contemplation, the ways colors or texts, for example, can bring into view memories and emotions.
Aesthetic analysis is also concerned with time and space, the historical and cultural milieu that encases a unit of analysis. In this way, context matters in an analysis. Of import, thus, one must ask, what are the specific and myriad contexts—social, political, and racialized—that come to bear on a unit of analysis? In this conceptual paper, I focus on the sensuous and sensory aspects of imagery, centrally asking, where higher education contexts function as a site of carceral logic that, generally, is inimical to that which is Black, what is the sound, look, and feeling of Black Joy?
Attending to Imagery: Methods
To affectively attend to the otherwise poiesis that is Black Joy, I metaphorically contort Western empiricism, to listen, feel for, and see as practiced by Jacobs (1987) in the garret space, by entering on a lower frequency. Attending to lower frequencies means being conscious of the connections that one sees and how it resonates (Campt, 2017). Said differently, images resonate—are felt, heard, and seen—at various and variable levels of perception. Centering these registers acknowledges the potency of an image beyond its superficial visibility or the ambulatory possibility of images to do more than what they are supposed to do—stay in their proper place and not challenge the mastery of the objective white gaze or soundscape.
Jacobs's text, which creatively used fictionalized names and modes of sentimentality, deployed imagery to move readers toward an abolitionist ethic in an anti-Black context and society, and as method for perception. With attention to the ontology of Black intimacy (Okello, 2023), the felt material worlds of Black people, I listened to, and attempted to recreate imagery conjured by Jacobs, while she was in the loophole of retreat, to consider the sound, look, and feeling of joy.
With, Through, and Alongside
Undoubtedly, analysis is a form of power. I recognize that analysis is and has been a project of objectification and misreading, particularly concerning Black women's intellectual thought and praxis. Being a Black scholar and grappling with a Black text does not absolve one from misreading, and, as a Black man, histories of objectification that play out in the present, of which I am a part, have at times quieted the fullness of Black ideation and possibility. Though imprecise, in communing with Jacobs, I hope to affirm Black women's labor and model a rigorous form of Black study that demands thinking and feeling with, through, and alongside Black texts.
Analysis
I curated a set of images referenced by Jacobs and analyze these images for what they might teach readers about joy in and under constraint. My aesthetic analysis thinks with Jacobs's loophole of retreat as my interpretive frame to notice and bring Black Joy into view. This deductive process began by arranging a set of terms drawn from my literature review and theoretical framework (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005): self-definition, possibility, subtle, exacting, being, and motion. This organization allowed me to look, listen, and reckon with the felt sense that the images created, emphasizing alternative ways to locate Black knowing and being, which inherently situated Black existence as an embodied process that registers at multiple levels and with the full senses.
Returning to Jacobs (1987), she initiated a model for Black Joy as the power to imagine beyond the moment and “envision that which is not but must be” (p. 17), or Black Joy as living the future as now. In this way, Black Joy manifested in three ways: interior elaboration: a rejection of conditions of livability as those determined outside of the self; cramped creation: practices of possibility, experiments in how to be; and otherwise imagining: inhabiting the world in forms hostile to the status quo—insurgent ground for new vocabularies.
Interior Elaboration
For Black people, breathing, taking in air, is an act of refusal that is concerned with the mundanity of vitality. One might understand interior elaboration, thus, as the pursuit and possibility of living under constraints prescribed to one's being. Notably, this is not a brand of refusal defined by opposition or notions of overt resistance; instead, it is measured by the everyday, quotidian epistemic, ontological, and axiological rejections of historically induced premises that regard Blackness as an irreconcilable project with humanity. In these analyses, interior elaboration was strategic comportment that infiltrated and undermined normative categorization. For Jacobs, notions of interior elaboration were denoted by the everyday necessity of drawing breath.
In Figure 1, a peered hole peered allows for a small glimpse of the outside. The design is imprecise and unscientific, the work of focused, yet amateur hands under duress. The image is slow, bringing into view layers that needed to be scaled and peeled away so that the rush of a new sighting might enter or become visible. Even after the layers are breached, still, there is a rugged unevenness that inhibits some of what could be seen, and, yet, emergence occurs, and with it, new sights, new ways of listening, and smell are taking into the body, mind, and spirit. The focus for imagery such as this, and as discussed by Jacobs, may be on what beauty may now exists for the viewer and listener with the hole creating light for a darkened place.
Gimlet.
On a lower frequency, however, one can begin to understand this loophole of retreat from the outside looking inward. In this way, a viewing of a cool blue and resting sun tucking itself in for the night, or yawning for a new day, is of Jacobs interiority reflecting a measure of safety under tortuous conditions, thankfulness, restlessness, and contentment. This imagery is a deliberate indictment of the restless, social, and political warrior who is supposed to be tirelessly laboring. Black women have long been the subject of stereotypical superhuman tropes that rob them of elaborate interiority, and with it, the experience of joy, unperformed, discrete, and mundane. The conditioning to see Black people as finding joy outside of themselves, in others and things, is entangled with the forces of history and coloniality that regard Blackness as nonhuman and ungender their being, thereby recognizing them as products for labor and accumulation.
On these terms, those who are nonhuman do not have the capacity for internal beauty. The thrust of this image is in its quiet yet forceful disavow of those predetermined terms of regard. Here, a Black woman claims joy as that which occurs in solitude, challenging representations of joy as fleshed in exuberance. Joy in this photo suggests a kind of protection and keeping of oneself. Also, the image of a rising or setting sun is not forced in that it welcomes and can receive something new.
On the feel and sound of joy, for Jacobs, the voices of her children evoked interior emotionality that openly rejected anti-Black scripts of Black people as incapable of affective depth. Of import, Jacobs made note of the types of sound she heard from her children while in the crawlspace, ranging from joy and sadness to pain and resentment. Jacobs's readings of her children, and her capacity to annotate how they were by the sounds they emitted, exemplifies interior elaboration and the range of felt experiences that joy can hold. Said differently, joy is more than simple expression; rather, it is a ground for meeting with, holding, and making meaning of the breadth of affective possibilities that Black people experience.
Moreover, interior elaboration conveys a permission to know joy as elastic, complex, ascension, and descension. It is worth noting that due to the limitations of the garret space, Jacobs is less descriptive about the actions and comportments that reflect her children's emotions. It is not known, for instance, if joy meant that her children were smiling and laughing, or if sadness at all times was connected to external pain. For Jacobs, the sound of their voices, which is indicative of pitch, tone, and vibration, was the affective resonance that moved her to tears and maintained her yearning for freedom and living.
One might read Black Joy, thus, as the refusal of conditions by which joy is felt, experienced, and expressed. Across these images, joy escapes the necessity of being seen, which is to say, evaluated, and public declaration altogether. These terms widen the terrain for joy as something not bound to temporal shifts of emotionality that would otherwise rationalize why one should be joyful. Interior elaboration as an act of Black Joy dismisses the notion that joy must be externally proved or provisioned by others, or that it can only occur under dynamic conditions; Black Joy undermines logics of anti-Blackness that direct Black liveliness and living. Black Joy is an emotive project that affirms the private places one might go to live more fully. Refusing conditions of livability does not mean escape, however. Jacobs is clear on this point, noting, I longed to draw in a plentiful draught of fresh air, to stretch my cramped limbs, to have room to stand erect, to feel the earth under my feet again. My relatives were constantly on the lookout for a chance of escape; but none offered that seemed practicable, and even tolerably safe. (p. 183)
Cramped Creation
Black Joy actualizes nimble and strategic maneuvers of interior elaboration to reject and reset the terms of Black existence, whereas Black Joy as cramped creation is an insistence that other ways of living make for safer, healthier, well Black people than those defined by white logic and methods. Black Joy, thus, should not be read as an inversion of joy, nor can Black Joy be regarded on the same planar lines as joy on general terms. Cramped creation, as embodiments of escape, is best understood as ontological projects wherein one yearns for freedom in spaces beyond one's current context. Readers get a sense of these ontological yearnings in the imagery of a gimlet that Jacobs discussed, and how she wielded this tool, in darkness to create opening (Figure 2).
Moonlight piercing through window.
A gimlet is a small, semicylindrical, tool, typically made of steel, that is used for making small holes. The tool has a handle on one end and a screw on the other, that allows a user to twist, or bore holes into wood. A gimlet is unique in that as the shape of the screw pares away at the wood, the excess shavings fall away through the entry hole. The gimlet, as the narrative denotes, helps to shape what becomes the loophole of retreat. The creative deployment of the gimlet is itself a work of improvisation, or the activity of doing that which was not planned in advance; Jacobs making use of what was at her disposal.
It is the activity of living, the conscious decision for Jacobs to care for her body against impossible dimensions that should be more precisely understood as cramped creation. Jacobs stated, “It was impossible for me to move in an erect position, but I crawled about my den for exercise. One day I hit my head against something, and found it was a gimlet” (Jacobs, 1987, p. 174). It is the crawling about in this passage that embodies the formation of joy as escape, fugitive, unending, and endless creativity.
Jacobs does not say how long she was in the garret space before she collided with the gimlet. Readers can deduce, however, that this chance finding was not immediate. One does not know if she crawled around her 9 × 7 × 3 den for days or weeks. The gimlet, being a small tool, was seemingly so unobtrusive that Jacobs resided within inches of it each day. One can speculate on the various postures she must have taken up to sleep, to rest, to breathe, and to relieve her aching body, each one critical for the work of survival. That is, before her moment of “rejoicing” (Jacobs, 1987, p. 175) in finding the gimlet, Jacobs was committed to multiple comportments, ways of being—creations—that actualize the gimlet moment. Here, readers are invited into the “season of joy” (Jacobs, 1987, p. 166) that Jacobs had been in before she entered the garret space.
Earlier in the text, before Jacobs is formally branded as fugitive and her brother and children are jailed, she resolutely stated, “every trial I endured, every sacrifice I made for their [her children] sakes, gave me fresh courage to beat back the dark waves that rolled and rolled over me in a seemingly endless night of storms” (Jacobs, 1987 p. 540). In this imagery, one might read the garret space, the “darkness as total,” as one scene emblematic of the “endless night” that rolled over Jacobs. As if foreshadowing what the sacrifice would require, Jacobs's movements in the space of confinement are connected to deep breaths of fresh courage that would be needed to get free and reconnect with her children.
Moreover, the imagery of rejoicing in darkness seems to regard cramped creation as memory work. Said differently, there is a specificity that enunciates Black memory, and that is enunciated by Black memory that pulsates in and through Black Joy. Sonically, this might register as additive rhythms and polyrhythms, the blue note, hums, moans, handclapping, foot patting, and various other approximations which underscore a particular way of representing joy, but there are other expressions. How one remembers, or what one can conjure up as a point of significance, may perform the similar work of call and response, cries, hollers, and moans in that they can return an individual to a moment, event, or state that enables one to experience a sense of being less felt in the everyday landscape-soundscape of society. Memory, in this way, is a medium and embodiment of escape. The lesson of memory, as a fixture of Black Joy, might be in its capacity to transcend space and time, that is, the act of memory creates the conditions for joy.
Additionally, that Jacobs love for her children is the connective tissue that informs her decisions may also imply that pathways toward joy regard the ontological as sociality or togetherness that moves against notions of individual ownership that would say that there is one posture (way of doing) joy. The assumption of sociality is multiplicity, transversality, and openness as opposed to individuality. Black Joy insofar as love is concerned, therefore, is a communal imperative.
Returning to Jacobs in the crawlspace, as that which considers the essentials of existence, that one can create the conditions for joy in darkness, is cause for celebration. The celebration is not of the conditions that demand one's nothingness (Moten, 2013), but a celebration, a matter of joy, that love might exist even as anti-Black institutions interdict, discard, and would have it that Black people would be reduced to nothingness and, as such, incapable of joy. Jacobs embodied cramped creation as practices of possibility in the face of constraint when she cunningly wrote letters, made possible by the glimpses of light bore by the gimlet, to distract those who intended to capture her to make them believe she was in another place. In the letters, she noted: I reminded him how he, a gray-headed man, had treated a helpless child, who had been placed in his power, and what years of misery he had brought upon her. To my grandmother, I expressed a wish to have my children sent to me at the north, where I could teach them to respect themselves, and set them a virtuous example; which a slave mother was not allowed to do at the south. (p. 193)
Otherwise Imagining
Imagining otherwise, as noted above, is a desire to live the future we must live in the now, present moment. Here, Black Joy as otherwise imagining manifests most precisely as desire. Particularly, in the loophole of retreat Jacobs gravitated toward states of expansiveness and self-expressed permission to exceed the constraints of society. For Jacobs, the everyday nature of Black living was full of risk because of anti-Black antagonisms that threatened racial and sexual violence, and the possibility of tomorrow, which is to say that tomorrow was not promised for Jacobs, nor is it for Black people. Amid these sanctioned and unsanctioned threats, Jacobs conjured images of Black Joy as desire marked by otherwise imagining. In a moment of otherwise imagining, Jacobs wrote: A streak of moonlight was on the floor before me, and in the midst of it appeared the forms of my two children. They vanished; but I had seen them distinctly. Some will call it a dream, others a vision. I know not how to account for it, but it made a strong impression on my mind. (Jacobs, 1987, p. 560)
The image, Figure 3, ruptures notions of Black Joy as a fleeting project. As tethered to pathology, Black people were regarded as individuals who do not have the wherewithal to handle freedom or be free people, which justifies extended legal parameters and minimized Black life to that which the state should control. Black Joy as a complex site and matter of infinite futurity contends with those ideas and practices as an instantiation of aspiration, and with it, the enunciation that Black people, in our expansiveness, exist and will exist in the afterlife of violence. The image reflects joy as a site of hopefulness and expectation. Regarding the latter, building on fugitivity, there is a reason for hope when tracing Black survival historically and in the present moment, remembering accesses teachings, both learned and forgotten, that might support survival in the moment.
Black Joy as hopefulness may provide the conditions for survival and does so with awareness of an anti-Black society that does not love Black people and militates against a sense of self. It is crucial, here, to grapple with joy as neither completely agentic nor haplessly bound; instead, hope and expectation are in a tense relationship. The image alludes to the presence of coloniality as an ongoing project that wills itself against Black self-definition. Where limitations might exist that could function to recycle and reify the colonial condition, the practice of otherwise imagining can also be the transgressive commitments that undermine and act against colonial limitations.
The moon lit window holds the notion of limitations and possibilities in tension in ways that confront utopian visions of what Black Joy is, does, or engenders. That is, Black Joy as a reservoir of affirmation and desire is a resounding echo of the future we want to see when confronted with the probability of violence and premature death. Furthermore, Jacobs’ visioning offers insight into what loopholes illuminate. She noted that in the moonlight her children were discernable, made visible, foretelling what the glimpse of light would later bring into view.
Additionally, part of what I hear in attuning to this imagery is that Black Joy, while in a tense relationship with realities of anti-Black disregard, is concerned with care. Said differently, the moonlight, as otherwise imagining, could otherwise be a metaphor for the ways care (e.g., Jacobs's love and sacrifice for her children) is operationalized to move Black people closer to holistically livable conditions. Based on its sociality, the responsibility of Black Joy is to care for, protect, what is seen, heard, and felt in one's core. Jacobs is instructive on this premise as she lamented prior to her anecdote about the moonlight that the reader would “perhaps think it [ her anecdote] illustrates the superstition of slaves” (Jacobs, 1987, p. 164). Here, Jacobs is modeling what it means to believe what she knows to her core, over and against the general disbelief that regarded enslaved people's otherwise imaginings, sourced in African spiritualities, cosmologies, rituals, and story, as irrational.
Otherwise imagining operates on the assumption that joy must mean something beyond the self; it is, alternatively, a care practice that has implications for shaping Black life and living. For Jacobs, futuring as the insurgent ground for new vocabularies is recognizable in the fact that various plans of escape revolved in her mind (Jacobs, 1987). That is, the loophole of retreat was a site for sighting, imagining, and preparing for escape. Otherwise imagining, thus, is an active practice of desire and relation against the always threat of capture.
Practicing Joy: A Discussion
Black Joy, even when coerced into silence, is not silent. Following Jacobs, Black Joy is a phonic substance, a labor of feeling with and for; the sound emanating from enclosure that drifts between still and moving. The sounds emanating from Jacobs's imagery provides a framing for Black Joy as interior elaboration, cramped creation, and otherwise imagining. In other words, these analyses make plain that joy requires practice. That is, these analyses and this subsequent discussion elaborate on what it means to practice joy. Threaded across the practices, several ideas emerge for practicing joy, specifically, notions of intimacy, insurgency, and interstitiality. These three ideas strain against neoliberal projects that rehearse disembodied practice, and when taken up can engender alternative planes of aliveness in and for Black students.
Intimacy
The questions that facilitated this inquiry sought to engender responses that honored the senses. Instead of, for example, what is joy? I asked, what are the sound, look, and feel of joy. This series of questions are affective and intend to gesture toward intimacy. In the slowness of the garret, though anxiety was present with the threat of anti-Black terror surrounding the home, it is there, in that crawlspace, where intimacy can become the loophole of retreat, where Jacobs can ask uninterrupted questions of the interior.
Relatedly, higher education trains students in and into ways of being, which is to say, away from the self and community and toward versions of being that are devoid of intimacy. In intimacy, I am referring to familiarity with the self and clarity about one's affective capacities. Unspeakable joy and the intimacy it may offer needs time, space, and energy to cultivate if it is to be and become useful in ways that allow students to experience aliveness. Higher education contexts, insofar as they carry out agendas of socialization, are complicit in the underdevelopment of interiority and intimate creation. In place of these procedures, educators can critique and abandon processes that reward labor and keep individuals from intimate praxis.
Revisiting the imagery of Jacobs in the dark moon lit room, for example, affirms this point. Though under duress, Jacobs constructed a site of solace that made room for expansive noticing. In like manner, for Black students, at rest, or intentional pause, the imagery affirms a right to presence, the capacity to notice and take active stock of the sight, sounds, smell, and experience of being in a place or moment. The image is demanding time to return to the self, unpack the multiple layers of self, and consider what one wants and how they might feel. The purge, or deepest dive toward knowing and understanding the self, as learned from Jacobs, occurs in the sacred space of intimacy. Educators and researchers must consider how curriculum, policies, and practice might prioritize intimacy.
Insurgency
In Jacobs's narrative, she wrote about the sounds she heard while in the space of confinement. That is, hearing her children was central to how she survived, and the violent sounds of enslavement catalyzed the urgent need to tell her story. In Jacobs’s (1987) autobiographical text, there appears to be “an attempt to transfer the knowledge of enslavement to readers by recalling and retelling how the institution sounded, how the institutional force of enslavement reverberated” (Crawley, 2017, p. 153). What is clear, is that though Jacobs was alone in the crawlspace, she was in relation with others, either presently (i.e., her children) or into the future (i.e., readers of her autobiography).
In this way, Black Joy is an insurgent vessel. The noise that Jacobs heard, and made, at the time of their emission, was unspeakable, and, yet, were evidence of life, an occasion for joy. Here, Jacobs offered a mode for thinking about joy over and against the dehumanizing modes of higher education contexts that monitor and repress Black people's expression. Whereas insurgency is an active revolt, uprising, ongoing refusal, and too, a space to plot, plan, and dream of possibility, educators and researchers ought to consider how various forms of relation might produce generative understandings of self and community life in and beyond higher education contexts for Black students.
Focusing on Jacobs's insurgent postures, what might it mean, for example, to consider modes of being untethered from higher education as mediums for pedagogy, curriculum, and community building? Drawing on the imagery of interior elaboration and cramped creation, what is the potential of community organizing strategies as a frame for administrative or governing bodies in educational institutions? What possibilities for study might be extricated by examining the work and function of Black study groups? Radical versions of care and sociality can be established by attuning to the various ways Black students are already detailing the relationality they desire.
Interstitial Openings
Resolving to pursue the practice of joy as a pedagogical, policy, and practice imperative defies the coloniality of being/power/freedom (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Okello, 2020; Wynter, 2003) dictated by white normative modes of being human. As the thrust of coloniality would have it, Black students would replicate ways of being devoid of intimate connection and relation. The affective world of joy that Jacobs accessed through the loophole of retreat, however, motioned for a mode of living that provided her with the time and freedom to ask specific questions about parts of her existence that the institutions/conditions of enslavement did not regularly regard. Namely, curiosity about a depth of being that lifted feeling as integral to existence and constitutive of intelligence. This truth raises questions about what the university can achieve as a model for deep connection, intimate, and collective ways of being. Framed as a question, can institutions that prioritize accumulation, too, generate fuller planes of existence?
What's more, the idea of the academic institution, seated in anti-Black logic, functioning as something that can produce Black Joy, is a proposition rooted in progressive liberal tendencies to decide what is best for Black people. Therefore, educators and researchers serious about helping Black students achieve intimacy and relation ought to consider their roles as that of interstitial agents. By interstitial, I am referring to an in-betweenness that troubles the boundaries of private and public spheres, where a certain number of freedoms exist for agents. Interstitial spaces are critical because they enable individuals within to challenge the boundaries of social, intellectual, and political practice.
Interstitial spaces, like Jacobs's loophole of retreat, are punctuated by inelasticity yet hold degrees of power that may enlarge understandings of freedom. Of note, interstitial, as the garret, is not the place of power, so to speak, but the site that Jacobs is able to manipulate (i.e., loophole of retreat) to pursue safety and, ultimately, freedom from terror. In like manner, educators and practitioners are not sites of power so much as the potential space where Black students can create and envision new possibilities for being.
Joy in Constraint: A Conclusion
In the chapter “Preparations for Escape,” Harriet Jacobs does not mince words to describe her experience of the garret space: I HARDLY expect that the reader will credit me, when I affirm that I lived in that little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space to move my limbs, for nearly seven years. But it is a fact; and to me a sad one, even now; for my body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment, to say nothing of my soul. (p. 224)
As if anticipating anti-Black disregard, Jacobs confronts canonical protocols and refuses to abide by them on the recognition that locating meaning in her narrative will mean amending how one conceptualizes joy and where one locates or believes joy is possible. In other words, Jacobs is after an accounting that refuses calculations of Black liveliness and living bound to finitude. She is refusing the sociological examination, the outsider experience, the liberal progressivism (Shange, 2019), and the typical way of reading Black being, “blind to the relay of looks and the pangs of desire and hint at the possibility of a life bigger” (Hartman, 2019, p. 5). Jacobs seemed to understand that researchers fail to discern “the beauty” (Hartman, 2019, p. 6), eliding the myriad ways Black folks create and elaborate living out of basic needs.
To be sure, the garret space exacted a toll on Jacobs's body. Higher education environments, in like fashion, weather the bodies—mentally, socially, physically, emotionally, and spiritually—of Black people (Okello et al., 2020). Amid the afflictions of the body, however, the loophole of retreat—carved out creations in cramped spaces—is, too, the garret, and sustains, holds, and emanates unspeakable joy.
Of note, at stake is not a revisionist reading of terror that invents or formulates happiness, celebration, and pleasure, nor a blitheness for beauty made of constraint. Instead, the assumption I am reading in the loophole of retreat is that there is no way toward beauty in the western social imaginary, and for these analyses, joy, except that one grapple with terror. Building on Moten, “no calculus of the terror can make a proper calculation without reference to that which resists it” (Moten & Hartman, 2016, 00.35.00.). Unspeakable joy functions as one such intervention on and against terror. Future research ought to consider how unspeakable joy annotates the ways Blackness is refused from, and, too, refuses the western social imaginary, and how methodological attunement to unspeakable joy can orient theorizing, policy, and practice toward otherwise praxis in the service of Black living.
The argument here is not for the celebration of constraint. My inclination toward Jacobs's narrative is in how she complicates renderings of joy and how those lessons might instruct Black students in higher education contexts. Whereas the condition of Black life is in an antagonistic relationship with society, unspeakable joy, which is to say, 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.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
