Introduction

Joy is necessary in the darkest of times, and we are in dark times.The essays collected in this special issue reflect how the oppressed have resisted through joy in the darkest hours of Modernity's long night."Joy cometh in the morning" (Ps 30:5).We may know this phrase from a religious context but here I want to take it away from it, and dwell on its insight.If joy comes in the morning, there must be a night.For the oppressed, Modernity, as Anbal Quijano and others have observed, is that night, for colonization and slavery, grounded on racism and patriarchalism, form the foundational trauma of Modernity, creating an unleveled playing field that undergirds society to this day. 1 The joyful resistance we turn to in this special issue is how the marginalized get through that night.To survive we must resist a death machine pressing against us.And here we turn to the extraordinary feat of pushing against that machine with joy.Often joy is necessary to survive, and always a sine qua non for thriving.All people desire and seek joy, as Epicurus and who knows how many before and after him have observed.Lately I have been pondering the relation to joy of the triumphalism of the political