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Christopher Freeburg’s Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life offers a crucial new reading of a neglected aspect of African American literature and art across the long twentieth century. Rejecting the idea that the most dehumanizing of black experiences, such as lynching or other racial violence, have completely robbed victims of their personhood, Freeburg rethinks what it means to be a person in the works of black artists. This book advances the idea that individual persons always retain the ability to withhold, express, or change their ideas, and this concept has profound implications for long-held assumptions about the relationship between black interior life and black collective political interests. Examining an array of seminal black texts—from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching pamphlets to works by Richard Wright, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison—Freeburg demonstrates that the personhood represented by these writers unsettles rather than automatically strengthens black subjects’ relationships to political movements such as racial uplift, civil rights, and black nationalism. He shows how black artists illuminate the challenges of racial collectivity while stressing the vital stakes of individual personhood. In his challenge to current African Americanist criticism, Freeburg makes a striking contribution to our understanding of African American literature and culture.
We all can name some of the Africanist aesthetic-structures that fuel African American and American art ... Syncopation, Improvisation, Call and Response, Cool, Polyrhythm, or Innovation as an ambition- But there are many, many more. What Makes That Black? The African-American Aesthetic identifies and defines seventy-four elements of the aesthetic through text and illustration. Using the magnificent camerawork of R.J. Muna, Sharen Bradford, Jae Man Joo, Rachel Neville, James Barry Knox, and more- as they point their cameras at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, and jazz artists such as Cécile McLorin Salvant and Wynton Marsalis- a specific artistic consciousness or sensibility visually unfolds. Luana even joins the camera crew as she shoots Oakland Street Graffiti.
During the era of the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans were brought as slaves to the Americas. Their memories, ideas, beliefs, and practices would forever reshape its history and cultures. April C. E. Langley's The Black Aesthetic Unbound exposes the dilemma of the literal, metaphorical, and rhetorical question, "What is African in African American literature?" Confronting the undeniable imprints of West African culture and consciousness in early black writing such as Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative or Phillis Wheatley's poetry, the author conceives eighteenth-century Black Experience to be literally and figuratively encompassing and inextricably linked to Africa, Europe, and America. Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism--known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.
Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time – philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another– from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology – producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful Winner of The American Society of Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize 2017
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination A Penguin Classic For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how shall Negroes think of themselves as he considered the new crop of poets, novelists, and short story writers who, in 1924, wrote about their experiences as Black people in America. He did not want to frame Harlem and Black writing as yet another protest against racism, nor did he want to focus on the sociological perspective on the "Negro problem" and Harlem as a site of crime, poverty, and dysfunction. He wanted to find new language and a new way for Black people to think of themselves. The essays and articles collected in this volume, by Locke's Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, are the result of that new attitude and the struggle to instill the New Negro aesthetics, as Stewart calls it here, into the mind of the twentieth century. To be a New Negro poet, novelist, actor, musician, dancer, or filmmaker was to commit oneself to an arc of self-discovery of what and who the Negro was—would be—without fear that one would disappoint the white or Black bystander. In committing to that path, Locke asserted, one would uncover a "being-in-the-world" that was rich and bountiful in its creative possibilities, if Black people could turn off the noise of racism and see themselves for who they really are: a world of creative people who have transformed, powerfully and perpetually, the culture of wherever history or social forces landed them.
Exploring the interface between the cultural politics of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements and the production of postwar African American popular culture, Amy Ongiri shows how the reliance of Black politics on an oppositional image of African Americans was the formative moment in the construction of "authentic blackness" as a cultural identity. While other books have adopted either a literary approach to the language, poetry, and arts of these movements or a historical analysis of them, Ongiri's captures the cultural and political interconnections of the postwar period by using an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from cinema studies and music theory. She traces the emergence of this Black aesthetic from its origin in the Black Power movement's emphasis on the creation of visual icons and the Black Arts movement's celebration of urban vernacular culture.
The Black Aesthetic Season II is composed of critical essays and projects in response to the second season of The Black Aesthetic Film Series based out of Oakland, CA and put on by The Black Aesthetic Collective, which showcased films made by independent Black filmmakers. It contains work that contributes to a larger conversation that attempts to define and demarcate boundaries around "Black" aesthetics while also positioning the diasporic diversity of Black cultural production and aesthetics as a self contained and self-referential global body of work. - Wolfman Books
While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation's capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, "cool," and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center. Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.'s Black residents.
Within the Circle is the first anthology to present the entire spectrum of twentieth-century African American literary and cultural criticism. It begins with the Harlem Renaissance, continues through civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, and on into contemporary debates of poststructuralist and black feminist theory. Drawing on a quote from Frederick Douglass for the title of this book, Angelyn Mitchell explains in her introduction the importance for those "within the circle" of African American literature to examine their own works and to engage this critical canon. The essays in this collection--many of which are not widely available today--either initiated or gave critical definition to specific periods or movements of African American literature. They address issues such as integration, separatism, political action, black nationalism, Afrocentricity, black feminism, as well as the role of art, the artist, the critic, and the audience. With selections from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many others, this definitive collection provides a dynamic model of the cultural, ideological, historical, and aesthetic considerations in African American literature and literary criticism. A major contribution to the study of African American literature, this volume will serve as a foundation for future work by students and scholars. Its importance will be recognized by all those interested in modern literary theory as well as general readers concerned with the African American experience. Selections by (partial list): Houston A. Baker, Jr., James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, Barbara Christian, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Sarah Webster Fabio, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. Lawrence Hogue, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Morrison, J. Saunders Redding, George Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Robert B. Stepto, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Helen Washington, Richard Wright