Riding on dissonance, playing off-beat: A jazz album on joy

Abstract

Inspired by jazz’s epistemologies and structures, this article was written as a Black liberatory jazz album on Black Boy Joy. Threaded through musical tracks, Black Boy Joy is conceptualized as a Black spiritual Life Force and a liberatory emotional expression that refuses the anti-Black curriculum antagonizing Black boys. Black Boy Joy centers Black joy through desire-based refusal and reclaims Black subjectivities and futures through Black aesthetics. Black Boy Joy is the quotidian refusal to stay in one's designated "place" and provides a space that gives Black boys futures that they want now through Black liberatory fantasy. Through fantasies and desires, I demonstrate how vital improvisation and dissonance is to creating Black liberated futures. Through the good mess of jazz improvisation, I invite the audience to (re)imagine, (re)explore, and linger with these concepts within a musical Black Study.

Keywords:

• Antiblackness
• refusal
• Black Boy Joy
• Black aesthetics
• dissonance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amir Gilmore

Amir Gilmore is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies and Social Thought In Education at Washington State University. His interdisciplinary background in Cultural Studies, Africana Studies, and Education allows him to traverse the boundaries across the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. Amir's broad research interests are Black Aesthetics, Black Masculinities, Afrofuturism, Afro-Pessimism, and the political economy of schooling.