Black Art And Aesthetics

Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings comprises an array of essays, poems, and interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers including Angela Y. Davis, Theaster Gates, Vijay Iyer, George E. Lewis, Sarah E. Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Nell Painter, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, 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.