Conqueror Laughter

I interact with the tropes of Southern storytelling and the symbols to find direct connections to contemporary black culture and to better understand the source of Black resistance in the South.

High John the Conqueror is a symbol of black joy and laughter and a tool of resilience and resistance. He was more than a trickster and often his stories focused on the power of secret joy and of not fully being known or understood. Zora Neale Hurston talked both about the privateness of Black folks and also of how that same privateness led to nonblack folks believing they understood High John the Conqueror as Brer rabbit but they did not fully recognize him.

I’m creating a throughline between this history of the public privateness of Blackness, specifically black joy, and the public and private lives of black people in online spaces. The private lives of black people are more public than ever but has the understanding of them gotten any fuller? One can argue this level of distance is what allows black people to wield these online platforms in ways they were never intended to be used.