Speculative Light
eBook - PDF

Speculative Light

The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin

  1. 328 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Speculative Light

The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin

About this book

Over the course of a thirty-eight-year friendship, painter Beauford Delaney and writer James Baldwin shared their private lives and shaped one another's artistic values. Speculative Light brings together scholars, critics, and artists who analyze the stylistic and historical import of Delaney's and Baldwin's works and examine how this friendship fundamentally shaped the pair's ideas about art and life. The book's contributors explore how the two men, sharing identities as queer Black American artists, first in New York and then as expatriates in France, created a speculative space in their work to think about more just and creative Black futures. Essay topics and issues range from masculinity, queerness, Blackness, and Americanness to the relationship between jazz, painting, and writing. Throughout, the contributors establish a positive history for Delaney's and Baldwin's arts that refuses a subordinate role to white artists of the modernist avant-garde. Ultimately, Speculative Light demonstrates that Delaney and Baldwin's bond provides revolutionary grounds for theorizing contemporary Black art and life.

Contributors. Hilton Als, Nicholas Boggs, Indie A. Choudhury, Shawn Anthony Christian, Rachel Cohen, Amy J. Elias, Monika Gehlawat, David Leeming, D. Quentin Miller, Fred Moten, Walton M. Muyumba, Robert O'Meally, Ed Pavli?, Levi Prombaum, Robert Reid-Pharr, Tyler T. Schmidt, Abbe Schriber, Jered Sprecher, Stephen C. Wicks, Magdalena Zaborowska

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Yes, you can access Speculative Light by Amy J. Elias in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & History of Contemporary Art. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. List of Illustrations
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Gallery
  6. Introduction. Speculative: Light The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Amy J. Elias
  7. I. Circuits of Selfhood
  8. II. Synesthesia and Arts in Dialogue
  9. III. Visibility, Performance, Abstraction
  10. IV. Continuing Influence
  11. Bibliography
  12. Contributors
  13. Index
  14. Plate Credits