Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings

Highlighting emerging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, this anthology provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a burgeoning interest globally. Black aesthetics emerges in the work of artists uncovering affective histories, museums critiquing racial inequities in gallery culture, and in the aesthetic forms of Black activists seeking social justice. It lives in streets, music venues, magazines, cinemas, and in places in society well beyond academia, whether in the U. S., Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa.

Black Art and Aesthetics unites Angela Davis, Paul C. Taylor, Vijay Iyer, Claudine Rankine, Kara Walker with early-career practitioners and theorists. Through essays, poetry, images, and interviews they think critically about art, culture and concepts of the aesthetic rooted in the social and political. Focusing on aesthetic intersectionality across range of different sites, they engage with questions of class, queer sexuality, narrative, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality in Césaire, parallels between Afrodiasporic and Chinese classical music and theories of black post-blackness.

Aesthetics encompasses all forms of sensation and perception in art, culture, and everyday life. By returning aesthetics to its original meaning, this collection challenges the dominant modern aesthetic tradition and brings into being new ways of reckoning with experience, identity and resistance, formed not only by oppression but by the hope for change.