“Need Black Joy?”

Abstract

Currently, geography offers few original terms to spotlight the meaningful interactions between race, place, and taste: how Blackness travels as a global cultural identity through digital technology. Using multiple methods, this chapter mines and maps a three-year longitudinal dataset of over twelve hundred events, announced online by marketing start-up Black Book LA (BBLA), to sketch the dimensions of everyday dynamic forms of cultural gatherings constituting Blackness as distinctive temporal urbanisms in the metropolitan city-region of Los Angeles. The findings suggest that Black cultural geographies are quantum: cosmopolitan, dispersed, complex, and often financially accessible. It repositions two popular yet undertheorized concepts—Afrotech and Black joy–as key traits and technologies of Black public spheres especially relevant for this digitally augmented era. It argues for three spatial understandings of Black joy that motivate new language in Black studies, geography, and information technology, or what the chapter refers to as “Afrotechtonics.”