Black Art and Aesthetics

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.

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).

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 Isn't 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 Césaire's 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 Don't 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