Black Joy as Cultural Resistance

On Celebration and Visibility in When We See Us

Abstract

This _Perspective explores Black Joy as a mode of cultural resistance and collective self-representation through a critical engagement with the 2024 exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, held at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Framing celebration not as a passive emotion but as a political method, the piece moves through five thematic reflections: visual sovereignty, spatial presence, sensorial engagement, everyday vitality, and shared empowerment. Drawing on bell hooks’ “The Oppositional Gaze,” Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Stuart Hall’s writing on cultural identity, and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, the essay situates joy as a curatorial strategy and relational force that exceeds representation. Through a blend of theoretical analysis and autoethnographic reflection, this _Perspectiveconsiders how the exhibition mobilizes joy not only through visual representation, but by crafting an immersive environment—through color palettes, spatial layout, soundscapes, and moments of embodied encounter—which invites visitors to feel, dwell in, and move with joy as a shared affective force. The result is a counter-archive of Black life that refuses trauma as its only frame. When We See Us offers a radically intimate vision of Black presence, where quiet pleasure, softness, and collectivity emerge as acts of aesthetic and political power.