Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson.
The stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance.
Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice.
Arvustused
Black Art and Aesthetics is an important collection of cutting-edge essays that explore the possibility of "revalorizing" Black aesthetics in ways that embrace both complex continuities and ruptures in the freighted history of aesthetics. The volume assembles writing by some of the most innovative artists and thinkers at the core of black contemporary art history, criticism and practice. * Tina Campt, Professor of Humanities, Princeton University, USA * This impressive and vibrant assemblage of artists, poets, and theorists showcases the beauty and brilliance of Black aesthetics. Each investigation buzzes with strategies for creating, living, and being despite difficulty. As a gathering, Black Art and Aesthetics promises to remake how we see the world. * Amber Jamilla Musser, Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center, USA * The essays collected in Black Art and Aesthetics represent a comprehensive statement on the continuing vitality of Black aesthetics and a revaluation of the cultural forces that have been driving the production of art in the Black diaspora. Drawing from a gallery of distinguished scholars, poets, and artists, this volume will serve as a model of critical thinking about Black aesthetics for a long time. * Simon Gikandi, Professor of English, Princeton University, USA * Finally, we have a book that explores and tracks the fugitive, complicated, intractable, and vital idea of Black Aesthetics with the expansive critical and intellectual sophistication that the scholarship has been waiting for since the 1960s. Finally. * Chika Okeke-Agulu, Professor of Art and Archaeology and African-American Studies, Princeton University, USA * Now that this wonderful anthology of Black Art and aesthetics is finally here, we can see just how necessary and long-awaited it was. And it's not just a juxtaposition of texts and works of art in a still tableau. It is, fortunately, a powerful expression of the movement and life force of the inexhaustible fountain of black aesthetics: fons africanus and fons americanus all at once. * Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor of French and of Philosophy, and Director of the Institute of African Studies, Columbia University, Columbia University, USA * Kelly and Roelofss collection is a welcome and much needed contribution to the philosophically-informed study of Black Art and aesthetic practices. The range of insight is impressive and the acuity of the analyses even more so. Artists and theorists alike will draw inspiration from these essays. * Robert J. Gooding-Williams, Professor of African-American Studies and of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA *
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This is the first anthology in 50 years to explore new reclaimed and transformed concepts, questions, and strategies in Black aesthetics from transdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface: Blackness, Whiteness, and Curatorial Care, Michael Kelly (University
of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA) and Monique Roelofs (University of
Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Introduction: Revalorizing Black Aesthetics, Michael Kelly (University of
North Carolina at Charlotte, USA) and Monique Roelofs (University of
Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
PART I. Blackness as Aesthetic Strategy
1. Coloring History, Theory, and Painting, Meleko Mokgosi (Artist, Yale
University, USA)
2. From the new black and from semiautomatic, Evie Shockley (Poet and
Theorist, Rutgers University, USA)
3. Art and Negative Dialectics: On Soft Aesthetics, Angela Y. Davis (UC
Santa Cruz, USA)
4. Embracing Injury: Black Queer Bodies and Poetic Experimentation, GerShun
Avilez (University of Maryland, USA)
5. Afrodiasporic Aesthetics in Classical and Experimental Music After 1960,
George E. Lewis (Musician and Theorist, Columbia University, USA)
PART II. Black Art Spaces
6. See Me Here: Defining Black Space at the Intersection of Artistic and
Curatorial Practices in Privy, Deborah Goffe (Dancer and Theorist, Trinity
College, USA)
7. The Black Image Corporation: When History Isnt Enough. The Need for
Corporate Practices Within the Archive, Theaster Gates (Artist, Chicago,
USA)
8. elevators, Simone White and Benjamin Krusling (Poets, University of
Pennsylvania and New York City, USA)
9. Aesthetic Form in the New Thing: Aesthetic Sociality of Musique
Informelle, Fumi Okiji (Musician and Theorist, University of California,
Berkeley, USA)
10. White by Design, Mabel O. Wilson (Architect and Theorist, Columbia
University, USA)
PART III. History Making
11. Swampy Land by the River Don, Nell Painter (Artist and Historian,
Princeton University, USA)
12. Addressing the World? Aesthetics of Resistance, Difference, and
Relationality in Aimé Césaires Plays, Mickaella Perina (University of
Massachusetts at Boston, USA)
13. Making Histories: Wangechi Mutu in Conversation with Isaac Julien and
Claudia Schmuckli, Wangechi Mutu (Artist, New York City, USA); Isaac Julien
(Filmmaker, London and UC Santa Cruz, USA); and Claudia Schmuckli (Curator,
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, USA)
14. Aliveness and Aesthetics, Kevin Quashie (Brown University, USA)
15. Two Images: Fons Americanum and The Right Side, Kara Walker (Artist, New
York City, USA)
PART IV. Groundings, Transpositions, Breaks
16. From the black maria and from Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay (Poet,
Stanford University, USA)
17. Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law,
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis (Harvard University, USA)
18. Survival is not a theory: Afro-Pessimism Transposed, Paul C. Taylor
(University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
19. Imitation of Life/A Box Full of Darkness, James B. Haile, III
(University of Rhode Island, USA)
PART V. Callings
20. Tracy K. Smith's Ordinary Life: Enfleshing a Theory of Post-Soul,
Daphne Lamothe (Smith College, USA)
21. From Citizen and from Dont Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine (Poet, New
York University, USA)
22. Dance On, Thomas F. DeFrantz (Dancer and Theorist, Northwestern
University, USA)
23. One-eyed Immersive Particularities, Jeremy Matthew Glick (Hunter
College, USA)
24. On Black Speculative Musicalities, Vijay Iyer (Musician and Theorist,
Harvard University, USA)
Index
Michael Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. He is President of the Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation, editor of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2014, 2nd edition), and author of A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (2017).
Monique Roelofs is Professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is the author of The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (2014) and Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the World (2020).
