Offering 2: Metaphysical Blackness and the Ontological Futuring of Black Youth Aesthetics

• In Event: Adorning Futures: Embodied Aesthetics as Lived Curricula for Unforgetting and Futuring Education

Abstract

I offer metaphysical Blackness (as the irreducible, worldmaking force of Black being that precedes and exceeds the terms of antiblackness) as an ontological and pedagogical function within Black youth aesthetics, particularly theorizing how Black youth enact Black aesthetics—a living practice of perception and expression (Mason, 1983)—to resist the epistemic and existential violences of antiblackness they experience in schools and society. I theorize Black aesthetics both as symbolic representation and as a metaphysical practice, where Black youth continuously re/create and sustain their existence in anti-Black worlds and produce knowledge within said landscapes of racial marginalization. These aesthetic acts (e.g., mapping misrecognition, remixing imagery, and envisioning futures beyond the immediacy of violence) operate outside of curricular mandates, residing in a realm of Black metaphysics, where Black life precedes and transcends negation.

Grounded in theories of antiblackness and/as social death (Dumas, 2014, 2016; Lofton, 2025; Sexton, 2011; Wilderson, 2020) and Blackness as metaphysical estrangement (Douglass & Wilderson, 2013), I reposition the aesthetic productions of Black youth as ontological futuring. These perceptual and expressive embodiments generate, for Black youth, alternative grounds for documenting the cultural interiority of Black life, inaugurating a desire and need to unforget the past, present, and future of harms brought on by antiblackness. Rather than reiterating loss (but not forgetting it), the aesthetic lives of Black students stimulate metaphysical Blackness as an Afromodern worldmaking force (Gordon, 2017), positioning Black youth as archivists curating social and educational lives against racialized foreclosure.

My methodological approach centers aesthetic labor as both site and source of ontological knowledge. Grounded in Black arts-based educational research (ABER), I build with Rolling’s (2016) theorization of the arts as an epistemological system, where arts-based research mediates lived experience by activating “the most human information of all—data impressed with social imperatives and emotional meaning” (p. 4). Across multiple qualitative studies conducted between 2014 and 2025, I designed and facilitated three research-based curricular programs in urban educational settings, informed by theorizations of Black curriculum theory (Colleague & Author, 2021). Data sources include youth-created artifacts, ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews, and arts-based analysis. I treat the Black aesthetic as theory and analytic.

I analyze three youth artifacts: Maya’s Hands Up, Don’t Shoot visual narrative, which unsettles the necropolitical script imposed on Black youth (Mbembe, 2019), rendering hypervisibility unstable through distortion and textual layering; Quinn’s Leeching sculptures, which materializes Fanon’s (1986) account of ontological theft, visualizing white cultural extraction as metaphysical parasitism; and Nina’s Sprouting Seedling sketch that reimagines Blackness as cyclical regeneration, drawing from ecological metaphors and aesthetic forms of repair (Lorde, 1984; Hartman, 2019). I contribute to arts-based research and Black curriculum studies by foregrounding Black youth aesthetic labor as a critical mode of worldmaking—an embodied and relational praxis that challenges dominant ontologies of whitely world construction (Taylor, 2016). Even as schooling spaces remain marked by antiblackness, they can be relentlessly undermined by the future-facing force of Black youth’s aesthetic praxis.

Author

• Justin A. Coles, University of Massachusetts - Amherst