University of Massachusetts Press
When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower
Key Metrics
- Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Hardcover
- 9781625347374
- -
- -
- Education > Essays
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
How do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature--how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, When Will the Joy Come? focuses on the journeys of over thirty Black women at various stages of their careers.
Joy is a mixture of well-being, pleasure, alignment, and purpose that can be elusive for Black women scholars. With racial reckoning and a global pandemic as context, this volume brings together honest and vital essays that ponder how Black women balance fatigue and frustrations in the halls of the ivory tower, and explore where, when, and if joy enters their lives. By carefully contemplating the emotional, physical, and material consequences of their labor, this collection demonstrates that joy is a tactical and strategic component of Black women's struggle.
Author Bio
Dr. Robin Chapdelaine's forthcoming book, The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria, will be available in January 2021. Despite efforts to abolish slavery throughout Africa in the nineteenth century, the coercive labor systems that constitute “modern slavery” have continued to the present day.
To understand why, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine explores child trafficking, pawning, and marriages in Nigeria’s Bight of Biafra, and the ways in which British colonial authorities and Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, and Ijaw populations mobilized children’s labor during the early twentieth century.
Drawing on a wealth of primary sources that include oral interviews, British and Nigerian archival materials, newspaper holdings, and missionary and anthropological accounts, Chapdelaine argues that slavery’s endurance can only be understood when we fully examine “the social economy of a child”—the broader commercial, domestic, and reproductive contexts in which children are economic vehicles.
The Persistence of Slavery provides an invaluable investigation into the origins of modern slavery and early efforts to combat it, locating this practice in the political, social, and economic changes that occurred as a result of British colonialism and its lingering effects, which perpetuate child trafficking in Nigeria today.
- Education
Ph.D. Women's & Gender History, African History, Rutgers University, 2014
M.A., History, Rutgers University, 2012
Source: Duquesne University
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