The molecule, as a perfect and ageless building block of matter that exists beyond human reach, has been an object of fascination and admiration since the 19th century. However, the discourse surrounding nanotechnology – at least at its most optimistic – promises the possibility of human mastery over this domain and, as a result, over all matter. This belief carries forward the old idea of a division between a realm of the base, material and particular, on one hand, and a (...) realm of the perfect, immaterial and abstract, on the other, one which today is most powerfully expressed in information discourse. Within this framework, nanotechnology promises the ability to negotiate and even dissolve this division, allowing matter itself to be treated as a kind of information. The most enthusiastic adherents of this idea believe that this will one day allow us to ‘reprogram’ material reality itself. (shrink)

The recent publication of the translation of Jacques Derrida’s Athens, Still Remains, a small volume of photographs and commentary, affords an opportunity to probe Derrida’s reflections on death and therefore on life as well. Looking at photographs and objects of everyday life, Derrida emphasizes the deferred yet certain nature of death and the way in which this deferral opens the opportunity to devote ourselves to life. His grounding of his philosophical and deconstructionist argument in contemplation of material fragments (the photographs (...) of ruins and scenes from the recent past of Athens) invites a comparison with the writing of sociologist Georg Simmel on ruins, time and death. Both writers attempt to discover practices of survival, the techne of affirming life in the face of death. For both of them these practices are sociological as well as philosophical, individual as well as collective, and aesthetic as well as intellectual. While their reflections thematically converge, their strategies for the affirmation of life are not identical, and we contrast Derrida’s approach, rooted in a concept of being in the world and a connection to others, to Simmel’s analysis which is focused on the role of culture and the force of the human spirit. Reconstructing a conversation between Derrida and Simmel and examining their intellectual rapprochement deepen our thinking about temporality and death as we confront the question ‘How are we to live?’. (shrink)

Introduction MAX BLACK Nothing of any value can be said on method except through examples; but now, at the end of our course, we may collect certain general ...

This paper examines global English language newspaper coverage of the death of David Bowie. Drawing upon the concept of reification, it is argued that the notion of celebrity is discursively (re)produced and configured through a ‘public face’ that is defined, maintained and shaped via media reports and public responses that aim to know and reflect upon celebrity. In this paper, the findings highlight how Bowie’s reification was supported by discourses that represented him as an observable, reified form. Here, Bowie’s ‘reality’, (...) that is, his authentic/veridical self, was obscured behind a façade of mediation, interpretation and representation, that debated and decided his ‘authenticity’ as a cultural icon. Such debates, however, were engagements with a reified image, enveloped in continual (re)interpretation. As a result, Bowie’s reification was grounded in a polysemous process that allowed numerous versions of ‘himself’ to be aesthetically reimagined, reinvented and repeated. (shrink)

From 2009 to 2015, U.S. director, Quentin Tarantino, released three films that were notable for their focus on particular historical events, periods and individuals (Inglorious Basterds 2009; Django Unchained 2012; The Hateful Eight 2015). Together, these films offered a specifically “Tarantinian” rendering of history: rewriting, manipulating and, for some, unethically deploying history for aesthetic effect. With regard to Django Unchained, this article examines how Tarantino’s historical revisionism provides a valuable point of inquiry into the ways in which “history” is depicted (...) on-screen and, more importantly, how depictions of “the past” can prove useful for highlighting underlying contradictions, ambivalences and ambiguities in the “present”. Drawing upon Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian approach to film analysis, it is argued that through a combination of fantasy, subversion and counterfactual possibility – most notable in the film’s final stand-off between its leading black characters – Tarantino is able to render the Real of U.S. slavery as an ahistorical antagonism. This antagonism highlights the ongoing trauma of these events in the present as well as the use of fantasy to explore their traumatic subject matter. Such historical fictions are not fixed to the past but, via an encounter with the Real, can be used to appraise the present. (shrink)

Those who know anything about black history and culture probably know that aesthetics has long been a central concern for black thinkers and activists. The Harlem Renaissance, the Negritude movement, the Black Arts Movement, and the discipline of Black British cultural studies all attest to the intimate connection between black politics and questions of style, beauty, expression, and art. And the participants in these and other movements have made art and offered analyses that wrestle with (...) clearly philosophical issues. In _A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics_, I propose to identify and explore the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life. The book will consist of eight short chapters, each of which will discuss a complex of related themes and phenomena. Every chapter will begin with one or two illustrative real-world examples, and then use the complexities of these opening cases to introduce the relevant issues. Many people in several fields have explored various bits of the terrain that I’ll cover. But none has surveyed the entire terrain in the name of aesthetics, and none has conducted this survey from an explicitly philosophical perspective. Setting up the project in this way means that its main conclusions will come in two forms. One kind of conclusion will emerge from the way I frame the issues. The two most important points here are that the field of aesthetics ought to cover more than the study of western fine art, and that the field of black aesthetics allows and requires the sort of comprehensive and philosophical analysis that I’ll offer. Another set of conclusions will emerge from my treatment of the specific issues in each chapter. In each case the aim will be to defend, albeit briefly, some position on the major issues raised in each chapter. (shrink)

In this book, David M. Black asks questions such as 'why do we care?' and 'what gives our values power?' using ideas from psychoanalysis and its adjacent sciences such as neuroscience and evolutionary biology in order to do so. _Why Things Matter_ explores how the comparatively new scientific discipline of consciousness studies requires us to recognize that subjectivity is as irreducible a feature of the world as matter and energy. Necessarily inter-disciplinary, this book draws on science, philosophy and the (...) history of religion to argue that there can be influential values which are not based exclusively on biological need or capricious life-style choices. It suggests that many recent scientific critics of religion, including Freud, have failed to see clearly the issues at stake. This book will be key reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as counsellors with an interest in the basis of religious feeling and in moral and aesthetic values. The book will also be of interest to scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy and religion. (shrink)

Women Activating Agency in Academia seeks to create and expand safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal stories and assemblages of agency. It provides readers with the opportunity to connect with the strategies women are using to navigate academe and the core values, linked to trust, relationship, wellbeing and ethics of care, they live by. The collection offers the stories of women academics from around the globe and across disciplines and showcases their efforts to meaningfully listen and converse in order (...) to resist self-audit and diminished identities. Reflections come from a range of responsive, personal and aesthetic techniques, including writing groups, guided autobiography, auto-ethnography, collective activism and slow scholarship. Chapters engage with themes and ideas such as agency, neoliberalism, ontological security, androcentricity, identity and collegial support, which manifest in unique ways for female academics. The focus in this volume is what really matters to women in the academy, as they share their efforts to 'be' themselves in their work, to 'care for themselves and others' and to 'count what isn't counted'. It aims to prove how collaborative storytelling and discussion can empower female academics to preserve and achieve these ambitions. (shrink)

The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies - termed the post-soul era - created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of 'Black aesthetic time' - a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time (...) collide in the process of cultural production - she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders - or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time. Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Taking aesthetics as a racial regime of modernity, the focus of Bradley’s Anteaesthetics is experiments in Black art which are not ‘worlding but an illimitable descent made to come before the world’. With a powerful introduction reflecting upon Nina Simone at the Montreal Jazz festival, and chapters which take us through 19th-century paintings, cinema, texts, video installations, and digital art, Anteaesthetics forces us to encounter the horror, beauty, and racially gendered dimensions of a negative inhabitation substantiated through the absolutely (...) dispossessive field of worlding aesthetic refrains. Working against the grain of debate, aesthetics is not generatively enrolled for the modern subject possessed of ontological security to productively world itself in new ways. Rather, Anteaesthetics enables us to critically interrogate how investing in aesthetics requires working with the negative, taking an uncompromising stance towards aesthetics as a constitutive force of the ongoing violent legacies of modernity. (shrink)

Drawing on reflections from a collaborative autoethnography, this article argues that ultramarathon running is defied by a 'dark' ecological sensibility (Morton 2007, 2010, 2016), characterised by moments of pain, disgust, and the macabre. In contrast to existing accounts, we problematise the notion that runners 'use' nature for escape and/or competition, while questioning the aesthetic-causal relationships often evinced within these accounts. With specific reference to the discursive, embodied, spatial and temporal aspects of the sport, we explore the way in which participants (...) begin to appreciate the immense power of nature, while being humbled by the fragile and unstable foundations of human experience. Accordingly this article contributes novel insights into the human-nature complex that seek to move beyond Romantic analyses towards a more sophisticated understanding of the relationships between (nature) sport, people and place. (shrink)

In examining the visual culture of Victorian London during the years 1855–1870, Lynda Nead in her book Victorian Babylon explores the difficult and restless narrative of modernization that any of us who have read D. G. Rossetti's “The Burden of Nineveh” will recognize as crucial to the Victorian imagination. As Nead promptly establishes, Babylon for the Victorians was a trope evoking gain and loss, triumph and hubris, future and past ruination. Taking this ancient city as her titular image, then, Nead (...) aims to rearticulate urbanism and modernity, indeed challenging us to reconceive what we mean by “modernity.” Positioning her own arguments against the influential architectonics of Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air and favoring instead the writings of Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau, Nead recasts modernity as an “untidy experience,” a “constant struggle with history” . Near her book's end, Nead provocatively claims: “Ruin is the resolution of the contradictory impulses of modernity” .Victorian Babylon explores the spaces of mid‐Victorian London and, more important, the experience of inhabiting those very spaces. This textual tour is divided tidily into three sections: a first on mapping and water, a second devoted to gas and light, and a third on obscenity, which Nead calls “improvement's other” . As Nead herself claims about the metropolitan travel literature she examines, her book speaks well to the eye. Victorian Babylon is a vicarious tour of London thanks to Nead's deft and abundant use of fresh images, which she has culled assiduously from private collections, archives, and especially illustrated nineteenth‐century periodicals. Her study thus takes us to fascinating places: readers travel along with John Hollingshead on his journey down to London's sewers; we are invited into Joseph Paxton's dreamscape of the Great Victorian Way; and we play for a night at Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, witnessing Madame Poitevin's balloon ride. We hesitantly enter the haunted and obscene Holywell Street.The catalogic abundance of Victorian Babylon works both to Nead's advantage and disadvantage. Surely the sheer range of Nead's material proves her points about the frenzy and incomprehensibility of modernity and the promiscuity of Victorian commercial culture. But invariably the variety of topics results in too much cursory analysis—a paragraph on photography followed by a paragraph on the International Health Exhibition; brief excursions into the realms of advertising, illustrated sheet music, and music halls. Subsequently, a reader might grow eager instead for book‐length studies of these issues. Yet the most egregious omission of an adequate treatment is the two‐page cursory overview of the picturesque. Here, Nead misses an opportunity to offer a more extended, theoretical treatment of the “metropolitan picturesque” and how this aesthetic category relates—or not—to the other psycho‐aesthetic touchstones for her work, which are the sublime and the urban uncanny. One might also rue the absence of an extended treatment of the relic versus the ruin at the book's close.The analysis of the book does grow stronger as it unfolds. The Cremorne Gardens in the second section make for interesting reading, and Nead is best at discussing London at night, the uncanny, and what she calls a poetics of gas. The final section on obscenity is most promising, for here the Babylonic polyphony of Victorian London—what Nead calls the twin mission, to build and destroy—hits the reader with full force. One might wish that Nead had spent a bit more time on obscenity before extending her treatment to the more symbolic, architectural expression of obscenity‐cum‐obsolescence, the Temple Bar. However, the fate of the Temple Bar is nicely evocative of the ruin and, thus, takes the reader full circle back to the ambiguities of modernity. (shrink)

The essays in this book depart from Fanon's prayer to understand decolonial aestheSis as Black Consciousness.

Electronic dance music has much about it to interest philosophers. In this article, I explore facets of dance music cultures, using the issue of authenticity as a framing question. The problem of sorting real or authentic dance music from mainstream or commercial clubbing can be treated as a matter of history and genre-definition; as a matter of defining scenes or subcultures; and as a matter of blackness. In each case, electronic dance music, and critical discourse surrounding it, offers fresh illumination (...) of aesthetic questions. I briefly characterise the main genres of dance music, match conversations about the hardcore continuum with philosophers’ accounts of genre, survey sociologists’ ways of thinking about cultures and their connections to taste and personal identity, and link criticisms that dance music now lacks blackness to conceptions of black aesthetics. This article is Part I of two; Part II focusses on dancers, DJs, and the aesthetics and ontology of dance music itself. Video abstract. (shrink)

In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for freedom as they appear in the work of artists as varied as Toni Morrison, Yvonne Vera, Aimé Césaire, and Issa Samb. "Fugitive time" names a distinct utopian desire directed at the anticipated moment when the body and mind have been unburdened of the (...) violence that has consumed black life globally for centuries, bringing with it a new form of being. Omelsky shows how fugitive time is not about attaining this transcendent release, but instead sustaining the idea of it as an ecstatic social gathering. From the desire for ethereal queer worlds in the Black Audio Film Collective's Twilight City to Sun Ra's transformation of nineteenth-century scientific racism into an insurgent fugitive aesthetic, Omelsky shows how fugitive time evolves and how it remains a dominant form of imagining freedom in global black cultural expression. (shrink)

This essay offers a novel approach for understanding the poetry of negritude and its role in the struggle for black liberation by appealing to Giambattista Vico’s insights on the historical, cultural, and myth-making function of poetry and of the mythopoetic imagination. The essay begins with a discussion of Vico’s aesthetic historicism and of his ideas regarding the role of imagination, poetry, and myth-making and then brings these ideas to bear on the discussion of the function of negritude poetry, focusing (...) primarily on the writings of Aimé Césaire and on Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay, Black Orpheus. (shrink)

This book analyzes the sociopolitical sensibilities of Black aesthetics in society by examining the historical and political context in which Black aesthetics emerged; analyzing various Black aesthetic perspectives that speak to social justice; exploring the interpretive conditions necessary to perceive Black aesthetics as a language of social justice.

In this response, I suggest that Black southern women in the U.S. have always been central to the “reconstruction” that Taylor identifies as a central theme of Black aesthetics. Building on his allusions to Alice Walker and Jean Toomer, I explore Walker’s tearful response (in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) to Toomer’s Cane (2011). Walker identifies their mothers’ and grandmothers’ informal arts of storytelling and gardening as the hidden roots of both her and Toomer’s (...) work. I suggest that Walker’s tears function to water her mother’s (and othermothers’) gardens, thereby sustaining southern Black women’s foundational work in reconstruction. Through telling their stories and planting gardens, along with crafting meals, designing clothes, and designing and decorating homes, southern Black women have always been necessary to Black aesthetics—filling worlds with aesthetically-rich and energetic artworks that Black formal artists such as Walker channel and transfigure into their formal artistic productions. (shrink)

This essay uses the concept of reconstruction to make an argument and an intervention in relation to the practice and study of black aesthetics. The argument will have to do with the parochialism of John Dewey, the institutional inertia of professional philosophy, the aesthetic dimensions of the US politics of reconstruction, the centrality of reconstructionist politics to the black aesthetic tradition, and the staging of a reconstructionist argument in the film, Black Panther (Coogler 2018). The intervention aims (...) to address the fact that arguments like these tend not to register properly because of certain reflexive and customary limits on some common forms of philosophical inquiry. The sort of professional philosophy I was raised to practise and value tends not to be particularly inclusive and open-minded, especially when it comes to subjects that bear directly on the thoughts, lives, and practices of people racialized as black. black aesthetics, by contrast, is an inherently ecumenical enterprise, reaching across disciplinary and demographic boundaries to build communities of practice and exchange. Hence the need for an intervention: to create the space for arguments and the people who work with them to function across disciplinary and demographic contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer C. Nash Black Lactation Aesthetics: Remaking the Natural in Lakisha Cohill’s Photographs In her 1992 essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” bell hooks recounts entering a “late night dessert place” with a group of colleagues who all began to laugh at a shelf of “gigantic chocolate breasts complete with nipples— huge edible tits.”1 For hooks, the chocolate (...) Black breasts are mammy imagery, a “displaced longing for a racist past when the bodies of black women were a commodity, available to anyone white who could pay the price.”2 For her white colleagues, the chocolate breasts are simply comical. Her colleagues’ response—their willingness to consume, laugh, and ignore racial, gendered, sexual violence—constitutes the racialized visual marketplace that hooks’s essay seeks to both describe and dismantle. The chocolate breasts become a rhetorical point of entry into hooks’s critical engagement with a visual marketplace where Black female bodies are delectable and disposable objects. hooks’s analysis has become part of a canon of Black feminist work exploring how Black breasts get taken up as signs of pathology, “excess flesh,” sexual deviance, hypersexuality, and alterity.3 From histories of the so-called Hottentot Venus and the preoccupation with her breasts, buttocks, and genitalia—including 1. bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 61. 2. hooks, 61–62. 3. See Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Jennifer C. Nash 95 signature works by Zine Magubane, Janell Hobson, Samantha Pinto, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting4 —to scholarship on the construction of black women’s imagined corporeality as “social dead weight” by Sabrina Strings, Black feminists have given critical attention to the construction of Black breasts as the location of Black women’s imagined racial and sexual difference.5 If Black breasts have been culturally and scientifically constructed as deviant, excessive, pornographic, and desirous, they have largely been uncoupled from an identification with nutrition—from the capacity to sustain and feed babies—except their connection with wet nursing and their conscription into maternal labor for white children. In this imaginary, Black breasts provide nutrition only when recruited as white property, with their nurturance capacity oriented toward white health and futurity. We might understand the cultural inability to interpret Black breasts as nurturing Black life as part of what Andrea Freeman describes as the “unmothering” of Black women, the unseeing of Black maternity except to elevate it as a symbol of brokenness or pathology.6 But in recent years, as I argue in my forthcoming book Birthing Black Mothers, Black breasts have entered the US cultural imagination anew. Black breasts are increasingly viewed as in need of support through seemingly benign state interventions to encourage Black breastfeeding. Indeed, Black breasts are recruited by an array of actors who often find themselves strangely aligned to champion Black breastfeeding —including NGOs, public health campaigns, and reproductive justice efforts spearheaded by Black feminists—precisely because Black breastfeeding is thought to perform urgent political, emotional, and 4. See Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender & Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 816–834; Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005); Samantha Pinto, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 5. See Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: NYU Press, 2019). 6. Andrea Freeman, “Unmothering Black Women: Formula Feeding as an Incident of Slavery,” Hastings Law Journal 69, no 1545 (2018): 1545–1606. 96 Jennifer C. Nash public health work. Black breastmilk is increasingly described as a crucial technology of Black life, one that supports Black infant life and inoculates it physically, psychically, and even spiritually against the array of anti-Black forces that wound and violate. The work that Black breast milk is thought to perform includes its posited... (shrink)

This article introduces the preoccupations and themes that define the study and practice of black aesthetics. It presents a provisional sketch of a field that has long been recognized in other humanities disciplines, but that is only now gaining wide notice in academic philosophy. This sketch emphasizes the aspects of the field that invite specifically philosophic scrutiny, while touching lightly on specific artworks, critical literatures and historical developments. Among the topics that receive attention are the following: race, aesthetic politics, (...) creolization, nationalism, modernity, white supremacy and the blues. (shrink)

What Makes That Black? The African American Aesthetic in American Expressive Culture delineates the African-American aesthetic in both the African-American culture and the artistic cultural formation of the United States. It presents a definition of the African-American aesthetic using a typology of seventy-four tenets-markers that expand the aesthetic's definition to include its artistic structure, cultural function, and consciousness.¿The book is both anecdotal and scholarly, creating an accessible dialogue in a research area sometimes burdened by excessive scholarly nomenclature. The power (...) of story (art) reaches into cognitive spaces and impact understandings unreachable by linear academic argument. ¿Physical features such as images, links to visual media, glossary, bibliography, and index make the project easier for teachers/students to use.¿The book approaches the African-American Aesthetic from wide-ranging sources, cross-referencing literature, dance, oration, music, dress, sub-Saharan African aesthetics, scholarly text, visual arts, athletics, children's games, and anecdotal accounts. (shrink)

This essay examines how Michel Henry's and Jean‐Luc Marion's continuation of phenomenology's turn to the invisible relates to painting, aesthetics, and theology. First, it discusses Henry and Marion's redefinition of phenomenality. Second, it explores Henry's “Kandinskian” description of abstract painting as expressing “Life.” Third, it explicates Marion's “Rothkoian” rehabilitation of the idol and renewed zeal for the icon—both phenomena exemplify “givenness.” Fourth, it unpacks my thesis: Henry's phenomenology, theologically applied, exercises an inadequate Kantian apophasis, characterized by a sublime sacrifice of (...) the imagination; although Marion's work sometimes evidences a similar tendency, its prevailing momentum offers theology a fully catholic scope. (shrink)

Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics TaylorPaul CWiley Blackwell. 2016. pp. 203. £18.99.

One feature that classical apocalyptic writings commonly share is their eschatological dimension, their "sense of an ending"1—the end of the world, of time, of humanity. But whereas traditional apocalyptic texts were for the most part utopian, their tales of destruction followed by narratives of redemption, modern secular apocalyptic literature is largely dystopian, ending in pure devastation. According to some scholars, the very arrival of modernity, beginning with Cartesian philosophy and its inherent doubt, was apocalyptic in nature. In the twentieth century, (...) as Thomas Altizer has argued, no central literary work—from Rilke to Kafka and from Joyce to Beckett—managed to eschew the apocalyptic.2 Today, at the .. (shrink)

Color charts, or grids of evenly spaced multicolored dots or squares, appear in the work of modern artists and designers. Often the artist/designer distributes the many colors in a way that could be described as “random,” that is, without an obvious pattern. We conduct a statistical analysis of 125 “random-looking” art and design color charts and show that they differ significantly from truly random color charts in the average distance between adjacent colors. We argue that this attribute generalizes results in (...) subjective randomness in a black/white setting and gives further evidence supporting a connection between subjective randomness and what is esthetically pleasing. (shrink)

My response to Paul C. Taylor’s “Black Reconstruction in Aesthetics” follows his example in engaging different disciplinary and thematic contexts. I start with an account of a scene in the 2018 movie Black Panther and explore its relevance to recent discussions about the restitution of African art objects. I then attend to some productive similarities between Taylor’s intervention into contemporary aesthetics and a prominent argument in favour of restitution. I finish by suggesting that the reconstruction Taylor calls for (...) can be achieved only if philosophers resocialize along a renewed commitment to engage Black aesthetics and Black lives in all their richness and importance. (shrink)

A groundbreaking, radical new study of the transformative cultural, aesthetic, & political shifts initiated by black contemporary artists inc. Arthur Jafa, Deanna Lawson, Dawoud Bey, etc. who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see-and see blackness in particular-anew.

Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being considers aliveness through the aesthetic doings of poems and essays, through the "imagine a black world" imperative that radiates as the operating ethos of the made-text. In such imagining, the matter of black humanity does not have to be argued for; in this state of aesthetic existence, being and becoming can unfurl. One is alive, one is alive, and this aliveness alights an encounter with the unanswerable ethical query, "how to (...) be." Black Aliveness, then, is a practice of reading as if one is in a black world, as if the reading one is a one, in the relational sense, in the philosophical sense of that pronoun, "one" being a word that allows the self to abstract itself in an instance of study. (shrink)

Deeply informed by jazz as music and sociality, Fumi Okiji explores black movement of thought as marked by a failure to be adequately disturbed by contradiction. The tarrying with the negative so crucial to European critical theory cannot quite account for the exorbitance characteristic of black thought. This is an orientation that allows for an oversubscription of intention, sense, and logic, against the parsimony prized by the dialectical form. Attending to the black immoderation that registers as nonsense (...) or deafening feedback from the perspective of European thought, Okiji tunes in to moments ranging from the Haitian revolutionary forces' singing of "La Marseillaise" to Cecil Taylor's synesthetic poetics to the aporetic mien of the orisha Esu. She brings our attention to a galaxy of intimacies that flash up with such improvisatory and untimely thought. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies developed in Jazz as Critique, and drawing Yoruba aesthetics into this cluster, On Black Exorbitance is both a statement of non-citizenry and a preparation for practices of intoxication. (shrink)

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.

This article explores the ways in which Janelle Monáe’s audiovisual performances leverage black female flesh to trouble historically constituted imaginings of ‘the human’. Tracking Monáe’s audiovisual aesthetics across ‘Many moons’ and Dirty Computer, I interrogate acoustic and imagistic resonances that recall the repeating horrors of bondage, and which also constitute performative ‘fabulations’ whereby freedoms that are engendered specifically by and within black female flesh might be imagined. Monáe ‘enfleshes’ the cyborg to critique cyberfeminist and posthumanist theories that advocate (...) for material dissolution as a framework for liberation, as well as to trouble black women’s historical relationships to the category ‘human’. Rather than understand Dirty Computer as a (re)turn to the human Monáe, I contend that the project extends the artist’s longstanding critical engagement with the black female cyborg and black sonic cyberfeminist liberatory potentialities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that the aesthetic practices of black women stand-ups in South Africa take up the concrete ways black people all over the world use performances, within theatrical or everyday practices, to create, shape, and transform their worlds. Reading stand-up as a genre of diaspora culture meant to contend with issues of antiblack racism, economic and social marginalization, and the legacy of colonialism, this article examines the ways humor and comedy manifest transnational intimacies and affinities via (...) the circulation of black women's comic culture. Black women's stand-up comedy enables us to orient our understanding of the inextricable link between aesthetic choices and diaspora as the locus of the production of blackness, and as a particular sensibility rooted in the struggle against colonialism, antiblack racism, and the struggle for human rights and recognition. (shrink)