This session examines the role of creative expression in activating, nurturing, and sustaining Black life-worlds. To do so, panelists consider how Black aesthetics “rehearse” liberation by creating the conditions in which living otherwisecan be imagined and achieved.
Our approach to Black aesthetics is inspired by the 2020 MLA Presidential Plenary “Poetics of Persistence in Black Life.” In that session, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, Evie Shockley, and M. Nourbese Philip began developing alternative grammars for understanding Black existence and endurance in an anti-Black world. Panelists extend this conversation by arguing that what is at stake in thinking about Blackness as an aesthetic mode is what Blackness does and can do. We argue that Blackness is “assembled” (Taylor), made “alive” (Quashie), and experienced as “liquidity” (Raengo) as it cycles from being to becoming, always finding its expression at the limits of the knowledge that the modern period’s racial episteme legitimates.
Our focus on “rehearsal” as a radical world-making act expands on and refines present notions about the processes by which Blackness is constituted, enlivened, and encountered. Rehearsal, we contend, describes the coordination of a Black liberation ensemble in preparation for a liberated future, something akin to goal-oriented practicing or reciting; however, it also suggests that the processual reenactment of Blackness is itself a creative process of liberation, rehearsal being coextensive with the performance that participants plan to produce.
To crystallize our accounts of rehearsal, panelists focus on four topics central to Black aesthetic theory: 1) the roots/formation of Black aesthetics, 2) the role of poetics in theorizing Black life, 3) questions of aurality in which the “jazz” ensemble is exemplary of Black sociality, and 4) the political ontology of Blackness as fugitivity. By theorizing rehearsal in these domains, the panel marks the significance of world-making in the “Black radical tradition” as described by scholars like Fred Moten, Robin Kelley, and Hortense Spillers.
Paul C. Taylor will begin the panel. His paper, “What Will Happen to All That Beauty: Assembly and Groundwork in Critical Race Aesthetics,” explores the connections between art historian Sarah Lewis’s account of “groundwork aesthetics” and his own account of Black aesthetics as “assembly.” Lewis has drawn this connection when discussing the political forces that establish an artwork’s perceptibility. Taylor shows how “groundwork” and “assembly,” taken together, help us both reimagine the prospects for contemporary ethical life and reckon with the culture workers who are already engaged in this activity.
Kevin Quashie’s paper, “Lucille Clifton’s Rhetorics of ‘Here,’” extends this discussion of Black world-making into vernacular poetics. Focusing on Lucille Clifton’s use of the adverb “here,” Quashie shows how two rhetorical constructs—deixis and metalepsis—render scale both temporally and materially. His paper pairs Clifton’s “here” with Bill T. Jones’s “here” in “Last Night on Earth” and Still / Here, Toni Morrison’s “here” in Beloved, and Claudia Rankine’s “here” in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. He makes the case that “here”—not “there”—functions as a Black invocation of imagining and intimacy that unfolds not just at the level of the sentence but also in the work of the word.
In “Where the Music Comes From: Blackness Present to Its Own Making,” Alessandra Raengo further considers the relation of form to informality. Her paper shows how Black art-making engenders processes of Blackness-making. She focuses on Kahlil Joseph’s short film Black Mary, which begins with a delayed synchronization. The film starts with a black screen before Alice Smith’s rendition of “I Put a Spell on You” begins; it then overlays sounds of a recording session and a collage of voices discussing death on top of images of a live band and Harlem lofts. Raengo argues that in the “quiet” before the music starts we are let into the moment of aesthetic production, the moment in which Blackness is present to its own making.
John Brooks will close the panel. His paper, “Re-Curation as Rehearsal: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Defacement,” focuses on #BlackLivesMatter defacement of Confederate statuary in Richmond, VA. He describes instances of defacement as fugitive acts of re-curation born from a tradition of radical Black aesthetics. Brooks argues that BLM protesters imagine new terms for Black life and, by insisting on agency in the face of subjugation, also create the conditions in which those new terms can be realized. In his view, defacement is thus an experimental exercise of freedom—or, a rehearsal of and for Black liberation—that releases a radical social energy.
La Marr Jurelle Bruce will preside over the panel.