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.
