Black Art and Aesthetics

Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings

Michael Kelly, Monique Roelofs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350294622
• eBook ISBN: 9781350294608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Blackness, Whiteness, and Curatorial Care
• Introduction: Revalorizing Black Aesthetics
• Part One Blackness as Aesthetic Strategy
• 1 Coloring History, Theory, and Painting
• 2 From the new black and from semiautomatic
• 3 Art and Negative Dialectics: On Soft Aesthetics
• 4 Embracing Injury: Black Queer Bodies and Poetic Experimentation
• 5 Afrodiasporic Aesthetics in Classical and Experimental Music After 1960
• Part Two Black Art Spaces
• 6 See Me Here: Defining Black Space at the Intersection of Artistic and Curatorial Practices in Privy
• 7 The Black Image Corporation: When History Isn’t Enough. The Need for Corporate Practices Within the Archive
• 8 elevators
• 9 Aesthetic Form in the New Thing: Aesthetic Sociality of Musique Informelle
• 10 White by Design
• Part Three Making Histories, Creating Worlds
• 11 Swampy Land by the River Don
• 12 Addressing the World? Aesthetics of Resistance, Difference, and Relationality in Aimé Césaire’s Plays
• 13 Making Histories: Wangechi Mutu in Conversation with Isaac Julien and Claudia Schmuckli
• 14 Aliveness and Aesthetics
• 15 Kara Walker, Two Images (Fons Americanus and The Right Side)
• Part Four Groundings, Transpositions, Breaks
• 16 From the black maria and from Kingdom Animalia
• 17 Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law
• 18 “Survival is not a theory”: Afro-Pessimism Transposed
• 19 Imitation of Life/A Box Full of Darkness
• Part Five Callings
• 20 Tracy K. Smith’s Ordinary Life: Enfleshing a Theory of Post-Soul
• 21 From Citizen and from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
• 22 Dance On
• 23 ‘One-Eyed’ Immersive Particularities
• 24 On Black Speculative Musicalities
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright