AFRST-325 Black Joy: Expressions, Practices, and Existential Significance

This course explores Black joy as a vital site of creativity, resistance, and existential meaning in the lives of people situated as Black. While much scholarship on Black life focuses on structures of oppression and resistance, this course turns attention to the generative, life-affirming practices of joy that animate Black communities across time and place. From music, dance, and literature to spiritual practices, everyday rituals, and collective celebrations, we will examine how joy functions not simply as fleeting pleasure but as a profound mode of survival, a politics of possibility, and an existential grounding in the face of systemic devaluation.

Maximum Enrollment

Writing-Intensive (18)

(Writing Intensive.)

Credits

1

Cross Listed Courses

PHIL-325

Prerequisite

PHIL-115 and one course in AFRST or consent of instructor