“Even under incalculable subjugation, during ‘the lowest point’ of American race relations, Black people developed the affective capacity to cultivate, feel, and express joy.”
In The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era from Cambridge University Press, Ava Purkiss has published her article, “A Paradox of Pleasure: Black Joy during ‘the Nadir,’ 1875-1905,” which “illustrates the struggles, stakes, and sensations of Black joy-seeking in the post-Reconstruction period.”
Ava Purkiss is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and a Clinical Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology (by courtesy).
Purkiss begins her discussion of Black joy by revisiting Rayford Logan's original discussion of the Nadir–the low point–of racial relations in his work The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901. Building on this, she “proposes Black joy as an inchoate analytic in hopes of it becoming a formal mode of historical inquiry.”
This striking article primarily regards Black joy in the post-Reconstruction period, but makes considerable note of the mirrored phenomenon during the Summer of 2020, "a time of historic uprisings in response to police brutality and anti-Black violence," when "Black people invoked joy during a moment that seemed to preclude it.” Purkiss illustrates this period as a modern rendition of the Nadir, and hopes her method of analyzing Black historical joy will become fundamental to the study of Black history.
Purkiss examines the difficulties in recounting Black history, noting that expressions of joy do not minimize the horrific violence and oppression of past and present moments, but that we need to “account for momentary breaks in despair” in order to avoid “flattening Black humanity.”
Alongside her dissection of the Nadir, Purkiss analyzes W.E.B. Du Bois's position on Black leisure, which “reframed amusement for his listeners, presenting it as a natural, God-given right that provided well-deserved pleasure for an oppressed race.”
Purkiss concludes, “When we think of, study, and write about the Nadir and other ‘low’ moments in African American history, the counterintuitive turn to joy might offer these unexpected and rich analytical possibilities.”
Congratulations to Ava Purkiss on this remarkable analysis and publication!
Read the full article here.
