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University of California Press

About the Book

A poignant account of 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.
 
At the Southern California Library—a community organization and an archive of radical and progressive movements—the author meets a young man, Marley. 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. But Black life is not defined by precarity; it embraces social visions of radical freedom that allow the pursuit of a life of joy beyond systems of oppression.
 
Structured as a “record collection” of five “albums,” this innovative book relates Marley’s personal encounters with everyday aspects of the carceral state through an ethnographic A side and offers deeper context through an anthropological and archival B side. In Joy and Pain, Marley’s experiences at the intersection of history and the contemporary political moment invite us to imagine more expansive futures.
 

About the Author

Damien M. Sojoyner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Look at California

ALBUM 1: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT 

A Side: A Place Called Home

B Side: Manufacturing a Problem

ALBUM 2: THE HEART OF REBELLION

A Side: A True Education

B Side: Watts to the Future

ALBUM 3: ALL THAT GLITTERS 

A Side: Nonprofit Management

B Side: All Power to the People

ALBUM 4: CRUEL AND BEAUTIFUL

A Side: Shelter from Paradise

B Side: Socialist Visions

ALBUM 5: LIBERATORY VIBES

A Side: Freedom Ain’t Free

B Side: The Price of Freedom

Closing Note: Freedom on the Mind

Grounding Materials
Works Cited 
Illustration Credits
Index

Reviews

"Lively discussions of Black musicians including Ice Cube and Kendrick Lamar pepper the narrative, as do deep dives into the tactics and strategies of advocacy groups such as the Black Panther Party and the California Housing and Action Network. Progressive activists will savor this in-depth portrait of the struggle for justice."
Publishers Weekly
"A creative, intimate ethnography centering on Marley, a charismatic and smart teen but reluctant protagonist. . . . The result is a gripping, up-close portrait of how the carceral state in LA makes Black life so precarious. . . . This innovative, intimate book examines Marley’s joy and pain as he encounters a web of precarity created by housing, education, health care, and social services. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
CHOICE
"A work of narrative storytelling, careful historical detail, and [an] homage to a community library that holds together many threads of hope within a system of destruction."
Journal of African American History
"Joy and Pain is a book whose message, dynamic depictions, and political intervention will be appreciated for its clarity and conviction by anyone interested in unpacking the fictions that create and sustain social inequality and the multilayered truths that challenge it."
 
Social Forces
"Damien M. Sojoyner's Joy and Pain is a powerfully creative project that maps and indicts the everyday injustices of carcerality, demonstrates humanity's resilience and capacity to resist, and illuminates new forms of abolitionist praxis. His brilliance as a scholar and commitment as a scholar-activist shine through in this must-read book."—Barbara Ransby, John D. MacArthur Chair and Professor of Black Studies and Gender and Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

"Joy and Pain provides a much-needed offering in the conversation about carcerality. The mixture of ethnography, archival research, analysis of the present and of the 1960s and 1970s, and the specific (yet deep) read of regional politics makes the book a standout. The love Sojoyner and narrator Marley have for Los Angeles is powerful and acts as an exciting guide for the reader."—Bianca C. Williams, author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism

"Sojoyner's approach deprovincializes the socially liquidating power of incarceration. Joy and Pain examines carceral state violence as a far-reaching, permeating flow of relationships that affects nearly every aspect of Black life in Los Angeles. Sojoyner meshes a tradition of Black ethnography and radical and experimental archival study to create a riveting scholarly narrative."—Dylan Rodríguez, author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide

Awards

  • CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 2023, Choice