Download or read book Black Aesthetic Season One written by Zoé Samudzi and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book What Makes That Black written by Luana and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2016 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Black Aesthetic Unbound written by PH D April C E Langley and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Black in Place written by Brandi Thompson Summers and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Matter of Black Living written by Autumn Womack and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What did the "Negro problem," as it was called at the turn of the twentieth century, look like? Autumn Womack's study examines efforts to visualize Black social life through new technologies and disciplines-from photography and film to statistics-in the decades between 1880 and 1930. Womack describes nothing less than a "racial data revolution," one in which social scientists, reformers, and theorists rendered Black life an inanimate object of inquiry. At the very same time, Black cultural producers staged their own kind of revolution, undisciplining racial data in ways that challenged normative visual regimes and capturing the dynamism of Black social life. Womack focuses on figures like W.E.B DuBois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as lesser-known editors, social reformers, and performers. She shows how they harnessed media as diverse as the social survey, the novel, the stage, and early motion pictures to reform visual practices and recalibrate the relationship between data and black life"--

Download or read book Soul Babies written by Mark Anthony Neal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Soul Babies, Mark Anthony Neal explains the complexities and contradictions of black life and culture after the end of the Civil Rights era. He traces the emergence of what he calls a "post-soul aesthetic," a transformation of values that marked a profound change in African American thought and experience. Lively and provocative, Soul Babies offers a valuable new way of thinking about black popular culture and the legacy of the sixties.

Download or read book Black is Beautiful written by Paul C. Taylor and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Renegade Poetics written by Evie Shockley and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beginning with a deceptively simple question--what do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as "black"?--Evie Shockley's Renegade poetics teases out the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. She redefines black aesthetics descriptively, resituating innovative poetry that has been marginalized becuase it was not "recognizably black" and avant-garde poetry dismissed because it was"--Back cover.

Download or read book The Black Aesthetic written by Addison Gayle and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1971 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Afro American Poetics written by Houston A. Baker (Jr.) and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baker envisages the mission of black culture since the 1920s as "Afro-American spirit work." In the blues, the post-modernist "chant poem," the oratory of Malcolm X and the political plays of Amiri Baraka, Baker notes the unfolding creation of a "racial epic" in which black Americans may discover their place in U.S. society and find their ancestral roots. He analyzes Jean Toomer's stream-of-consciousness protest novel Cane, ponders why apolitical poet Countee Cullen became a voice of the people and pays tribute to critic-poet Larry Neal and to Hoyt Fuller, the editor of Negro Digest who allied himself with the Black Arts movement. He also traces his own shift from "guerrilla theater revolutionary" to embattled theoretician. ISBN 0-299-11500-3: $22.50 (For use only in the library).

Download or read book Black Cool written by Rebecca Walker and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soft Skull Press proudly offers this tenth-anniversary edition of visionary essays exploring the glory and power of Black Cool, curated by thought leader and bestselling author Rebecca Walker, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Originally published in 2012, this collection of illuminating essays exploring the ineffable and protean aesthetics of Black Cool has been widely cited for its contribution to much of the contemporary discussion of the influence of Black Cool on culture, politics, and power around the world. Curated by Rebecca Walker, and drawing on her lifelong study of the African roots of Black Cool and its expression within the African diaspora, this collection identifies ancestral elements often excluded from colloquial understandings of Black Cool: cultivated reserve, coded resistance, intentional audacity, transcendent intellectual and spiritual rigor, intentionally disruptive eccentricity, and more. With essays by some of America’s most innovative Black thinkers, including visual artist Hank Willis Thomas, writer and filmmaker dream hampton, MacArthur-winning photographer Dawoud Bey, fashion legend Michaela angela Davis, and critical theorist and cultural icon bell hooks, Black Cool offers an excavation of the African roots of Cool and its hitherto undefined legacy in American culture and beyond. This edition includes a new introduction from Rebecca Walker, a powerful meditation on the genesis, creation, completion, and subsequent impact of this landmark volume over the last decade.

Download or read book Spectacular Blackness written by Amy Abugo Ongiri and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The New Negro Aesthetic written by Alain Locke and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Sterling A Brown written by Joanne V. Gabbin and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sterling A. Brown's achievement and influence in the field of American literature and culture are unquestionably significant. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, German, and Russian and has been read in literary circles throughout the world. He is also one of the principal architects of black criticism. His critical essays and books are seminal works that give an insider's perspective of literature by and about blacks. Leopold Sedar Senghor, who became familiar with Brown's poetry and criticism in the 1920s and 1930s, called him "an original militant of Negritude, a precursor of our movement." Yet Joanne V. Gabbin's book, originally published in 1985, remains the only study of Brown's work and influence. Gabbin sketches Brown's life, drawing on personal interviews and viewing his achievements as a poet, critic, and cultural griot. She analyzes in depth the formal and thematic qualities of his poetry, revealing his subtle adaptation of song forms, especially the blues. To articulate the aesthetic principles Brown recognized in the writings of black authors, Gabbin explores his identification of the various elements that have come together to create American culture.

Download or read book Black and Blur written by Fred Moten and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur—the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

Download or read book Black Post Blackness written by Margo Natalie Crawford and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.

Download or read book Blackpentecostal Breath written by Ashon T. Crawley and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or “otherwise” modes of existence can serve as disruptions against the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black Pentecostalism—a multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect with one strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los Angeles—Blackpentecostal Breath reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. As Crawley deftly reveals, these choreographic, sonic, and visual practices and the sensual experiences they create are not only important for imagining what Crawley identifies as “otherwise worlds of possibility,” they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture in an era when such expressions are increasingly under siege.