In/Visible Black Pain and Joy: The Embodiment of Colonial Mentality and Black Joy Among Black Women in Finland

This article analyzes how anti-Black racism operates affectively in shaping Black women’s collective intimacies and experiences of colonial mentality. Using affect theory, a Fanonian understanding of colonial mentality, and a reparative reading approach, it centres on the epistemic authority of Black women living in Finland. Through this approach, the article captures the in/visibility of pain and joy of Blackness in their bodyminds. By accentuating their encounters within structures, such as the school system, that excludes and hyper(in)visibilizes them, this article asks how anti-Blackness shapes the lives of Black women. Our analysis reveals that colonial mentality is an affective process, contributing to these women’s psychic distress, and personified through self-censorship and desires for invisibility. Yet, participants also voiced reclamation through Black joy as a form of epistemic resistance, fostering self- and collective intimacies. Our findings contribute to scholarship on Black affect by illustrating that the influences of anti-Black racism are not totalizing, rather, Blackness is continuously reimagined and reclaimed.