This highly original story reflects on how the carceral state shapes daily life for young Black people-and how Black Americans resist, find joy, and cultivate new visions for the future. Joy and Pain is about a young man, Marley, and a particular place, the Southern California Library-an archive of radical and progressive movements and a community organization where the author meets Marley. Taking music as its thematic undercurrent, the book is structured as a "record collection." Each of the five "albums" relates Marley's personal encounters with everyday aspects of the carceral state through an ethnographic A side and then offers deeper context through an anthropological and archival B side. In telling Marley's story, Damien M. Sojoyner depicts the overwhelming nature of Black precarity in the twenty-first century through the lenses of housing, education, health care, social services, and juvenile detention facilities. But Black life is not defined by precarity; it must embrace social visions of radical freedom that allow the cultivation of a life of joy beyond systems of oppression. In Joy and Pain, we see how Marley's experience intersects with history and the contemporary political moment-Black knowledge production, Black liberation movements, community-based organizing-to imagine expansive futures.

Book Information
ISBN 9780520390416
Author Damien M. Sojoyner
Format Hardback
Page Count 250
Imprint University of California Press
Publisher University of California Press
Weight(grams) 152g