Inhabiting the Present: Joy, Embodiment, and Presence as an Imperative

Autoethnography, like the song “This Joy,” can be an embodied instantiation of how to be. Drawing on the song as a point of departure, this essay explores how Black feminist autoethnography asserts ontological claims on the present, positioning itself as a practice of embodied, ethical attunement to everyday instantiations of Black living. Traveling across time, I return to my boyhood lessons on and about joy and move forward to a contemporary encounter with anti-Black custody, considering the claims to—and of—joy that emerge in these moments. Through this lens, I interrogate what possibilities autoethnography offers for inhabiting the present against the protracted, anti-Black haunting sustained by Western institutions, particularly educational institutions. The essay begins with an invitation into the sights and sounds of one Black church, revisits an anti-Black scene of custody, and closes with a poetic rumination on the work of presence, staking a claim on the present against overlapping forces of anti-Black enclosure.