Black Public Joy

An essay on restriction, resistance, and reclaiming space, Black Public Joy is essential reading for all politically engaged Canadians wanting to learn more about anti-Black racism in Canada.

During a crucial moment in Black life in North America, Jay Pitter has been engaging directly and passionately in the protest movement around police violence, and through the lens of her work as a placemaker, highlighting all the ways in which Black life is restricted in the realm of public space. Taking the form of a five-part essay, Black Public Joy addresses the ways in which anti-Black racism constructs and constrains public space and argues for the insistent and essential fight to claim that same space for Black joy.

Authored during a global pandemic and on-going street-based brutality threating Black lives, this essay also bears witness to systemic oppression correlating the relationship between these phenomena and the slave auction block where Black people first experienced public life. It evokes the voices of unheld selves, elders, activists, urbanists, and front stoop philosophers confronting spatialized anti-Blackness, which manifests itself in the margins, affluent neighbourhoods and along main streets alike. It reveals how state sanctioned hemming in and terror contravenes the very tenets of democracy and starve our shared pageantry and placemaking rituals. By embracing these complexities, Jay Pitter seeks to disrupt the territoriality of Black geographies often perceived as merely marginal and traumatic–giving way to an insistence of Black public joy.