Black Joy by Any Means Necessary: Deviance, Pleasure and Critical Media

Thursday, April 7, 2022 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Hybrid: Penn Museum & Online

This location is ADA accessible

Kitchen-table style discussion with Chaz Barracks, Aimee Meredith Cox, Shaka McGlotten, and Charlyn Griffith with Antoine Haywood and Deborah A. Thomas

Con-artistry as a theory and practice stems from interpretations of the trickster in oral and literary traditions to contextualize and explain the scholarly motivations undergirding some accounts of black criminality and deviant performance as joy- seeking practice. Con-artistry references a broader practice beyond tricksterism, which historically has focused heavily on the powerless procuring things from the powerful, rather than an everyday practice of survival and fulfillment, which includes achieving desired material goods and obtaining black joy by any means necessary.
 
A panel of fellow Blackademics and media/visual artists will reflect on Black joy as form of resistance— not only through our shapeshifting scholarship/art practice but through the embodied practices we have gained from the homeplace, what the late bell hooks taught us to be the site of resistance, where we may exist as Black in all our boundlessness.

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