Taking it easy: Disrupting development, justice and reparations through black in-bodiment and creative expression in the USA

Abstract

The legacies and afterlives of slavery contribute to the racist, gendered, classist domination and unrest encountered by Black Americans living in the so-called ‘post-racial’ United States of America. This violence persists despite the continual developments of racial justice movements and calls for decolonization. Grounded in the emerging scholarship of the ‘Black Horizon’ together with trailblazing work undertaken by Black Feminist scholars, and applying a diffractive methodology by taking rest and conversation as methods, we investigated how rest is an embodied practice through which Black Americans avow their bodies and pleasure that were previously violently denied to them in the making of the modern world. Backed by empirical evidence gathered with a Cincinnati based pole dancing collective founded by Black women, our study claims that taking it easy – resting – fundamentally challenges the anti-Black foundation of the modern world, as a refusal to participate in the continual exploitation of both Black labor and pleasure.