Study Notes: Black Post-Blackness - The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics
Core Definitions and the Theory of Black Post-Blackness
Black Aesthetics Defined: Paul C. Taylor defines black aesthetics as "the practice of using art, criticism, or analysis to explore the role that expressive objects and practices play in creating and maintaining black life-worlds."
Rhythm as Vibratory Shock: A 1967 issue of Soulbook defines rhythm as a "vibratory shock" that grips the senses at the root of being and turns concrete lines, surfaces, and movements toward the "light of the spirit."
Black Post-Blackness Defined: Crawford uses this term to describe radical black aesthetics as a constant push toward the unimaginable while simultaneously holding onto the radicalness of black life in an anti-black world. It represents the "changing same"—a term coined by Amiri Baraka—to frame blackness as moving forward while remaining grounded.
Suspended State of Being: Black post-blackness is a state of suspension where consciousness-raising and experimentation are inseparable. Baraka illustrates this in his poem "It’s Nation Time," stretching the word "time" into "time eye ime."
Tidalectics vs. Linearity: Drawing from Kamau Brathwaite and Nathaniel Mackey, black post-blackness operates via "tidalectics"—a cyclical, back-and-forth movement like water, rather than a linear, Hegelian progression (thesis-antithesis-synthesis).
Black as Excess: In its most radical usage during the Black Arts Movement (BAM), "black" signaled excess and the "not yet here" (José Munoz). It was a naming of the unknown dimensions of freedom.
The Aesthetics of Anticipation
Comparison of BAM and Harlem Renaissance: Dudley Randall noted that Langston Hughes’s 1926 declaration in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" was the closest predecessor to the black aesthetic credo, with key differences in individualism and terminology.
The "Garvey Era": Kalamu ya Salaam argues the Harlem Renaissance should be known as the "Garvey era" due to its radical undercurrents. Countee Cullen’s 1927 poem "Colors" anticipated BAM aesthetic warfare by rewriting the pan-African red, black, and green into "red, black, and the unknown."
Marita Bonner’s The Purple Flower (1926): This play uncannily anticipated 1960s black revolutionary drama. It used a horizontal division of the stage (valley vs. hill) to explore spatial power and featured "Us" (black people) becoming "twisted mounds" during a decolonizing "fall" of consciousness.
Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923):
Captured "black is beautiful" as it was fading.
Anticipated the rejection of black respectability in favor of "magnetic blackness."
Anticipated the Southern orientation (BLKARTSOUTH) of the movement.
Portrayed the "black grotesque" as a thing of suffering and beauty in the character of the dwarf in "Box Seat."
Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama (1961):
Written in response to the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival riot.
Used the refrain "ASK YOUR MAMA" as a gestural wink refusing to explain blackness to the "unhep."
Critiqued the "safari" approach to collecting black folk culture by white scholars like Moe Asch or Alan Lomax.
The Politics of Abstraction
Strategic Abstraction vs. Strategic Essentialism: While the BAM is often associated with essentialism, it utilized abstraction to "denaturalize" black representational space. A.B. Spellman asserted, "Abstraction didn’t cost consciousness."
Raymond Saunders and "Black Is a Color": In his 1967 pamphlet, Saunders argued that racial issues were extraneous to art and that "black" should be seen as a color, not just a political ideology.
AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists):
Mimesis at Midpoint: A central principle defined as the spot where the real and unreal meet—halfway between absolute abstraction and absolute naturalism.
Shine: An aesthetic tenet referring to luminosity, both literal (shoes, hair) and figurative (spiritual effulgence).
Lettering: Incorporated written messages to control the interpretation of images, rather than acting as a simple headline.
Faith Ringgold’s Black Light Paintings (1967–69): Experimented with tonal ranges of black flesh without using white paint, emanatng light from within darkness. This created a new "epistemology of light."
David Hammons and Invisibility: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man uses lightbulbs (), anticipating the BAM move to "black light." Glenn Ligon later smudged these words in text paintings to emphasize the power of the opaque.
The Counter-Literacy of Black Mixed Media
Interactive Primers: BAM texts like In Our Terribleness (1970) functioned as handbooks for black style, attempting to teach an alternative feeling described as a "forgotten geometry of fusion."
Public Interiority of the Black Book: The foundational mission was "publishing our own books" (Haki Madhubuti).
The Black Book (1974): Edited by Middleton Harris with Toni Morrison, it functioned as a "treasure chest" archive of the black experience.
In Our Terribleness: Featured a silver mirror title page requiring readers to see their own face as they entered the text.
Visual/Oral Synthesis: Broadsides produced by Third World Press and Broadside Press utilized "word pictures" and atypical layouts to create a posterized consciousness.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014): Features David Hammons’s sculpture In the Hood on the cover. The text uses the second person to decenter the "I" and explores the "dominant, residual, and emergent" feelings of being a black citizen.
John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse’s Seismosis (2006): An experimental word-and-image text that refuses "signature" to prevent identity from becoming a confining container.
BLKARTSOUTH and the Global South
Regional Specificity: BLKARTSOUTH added a Southern orientation to the BAM. Tom Dent described the movement as a "bubbling organism" resulting from his return to New Orleans.
Journal Nkombo (1968–1974): Named after the Bantu word for gumbo.
Used a "cookbook" format to present poems as raw ingredients rather than final dishes.
Emphasized the "not yet finished" nature of the revolution.
Incorporated work from Alice Walker, including her poem "The Labels Slip Sometimes."
Second-Line Aesthetic: David Henderson’s "Jass Funeral" (1967) describes a New Orleans funeral procession as a two-way mirror where the photographer must dance to produce the art, embodying "living as form."
Satire and Black Play
Afro Satire: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) satirizes the fear of black aesthetics through the "Jes Grew" plague—an anti-plague that "won’t stop until it cohabits with what it’s after."
The Burden of Ideology: Sharon Stockard Martin’s play Edifying Further Elaborations on the Mentality of a Chore (1969) satirizes the exhaustion of the "proclamation" that black is beautiful, describing it as a "chore."
Slumberland (2008): Paul Beatty’s novel begins with the declaration that "blackness has officially been declared passé," utilizing sound and DJ culture to explore "indeterminate blackness."
Charles Johnson’s Cartoons: His 1970–1972 editorial cartoons often mocked the conformity of the Black Power fist while simultaneously searching for new symbols.
Public Space and the Black Fantastic
Outdoor Museums: BAM muralists Gary Rickson and Nelson Stevens created functional public art to counteract the lack of black representation in white museums. Stevens used words in murals like "Work to Unify African People" to control interpreted meaning.
Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014): Staged in a condemned Brooklyn sugar refinery. The massive white sugar sphinx-mammy figure prompted a controversy regarding the "refining" of brownness into whiteness and the role of non-black spectators taking "selfies."
The Black Fantastic (Richard Iton): A genre that destabilizes distinctions between the reasonable and unreasonable. Erykah Badu’s "Window Seat" (2010)—where she nakedly reconstructs her own assassination at the site of JFK’s death—is a prime example of the black fantastic.
Mingering Mike: A teenager during the BAM who created elaborate "fake" soul record covers and cardboard records, realizing that surface really can be the substance.
Epilogue: The Structure of Feeling
Black Nationalism as Improvisation: Rather than a rigid ideology, black nationalism functioned as a "ingenious improvisation."
Chromatic Black: Unlike straight pigment black, "chromatic black" is a mix of other colors (red, green, blue). Black post-blackness is this complex, subtle mixture.
The Box and the Page: Terrance Hayes explores "blacks in a box," questioning if the forms of poetry are constraints or structures of release. The epilogue concludes that blackness has always been "beyond," as indicated by the recursive and "feeling-with" nature of the tradition.
Qushie’s statement about quiet can be seen in parallel with the concepts of black aesthetics and post-blackness explored in the provided notes. While black aesthetics emphasizes expressive art forms that contribute to creating and maintaining black life-worlds, Qushie’s notion of quiet could be interpreted as the absence or silencing of certain voices and expressions in the broader conversation about identity and culture. In the context of black post-blackness—characterized by a dynamic relationship between the known and the unknown—quiet may refer to the introspective and experimental aspects of black consciousness. It highlights a tension between visible expression and the subtleties of lived experience that do not always manifest in outward displays but still hold significant depth and meaning. This aligns with the idea that black post-blackness exists in a state of suspension, where silence can be powerful and reflective, serving as a space for consciousness-raising amid the noise of both anti-black sentiments and dominant cultural narratives. The relationship can suggest that within quietude lies a radical potential for reimagining black existence, akin to the transformations seen in black art and performance.