Poetics of Protest, from Africa to Minneapolis

• In Event: Islam and Black Art: A Diasporic Aesthetics

Abstract

This presentation is a tale of intellectual journey, a quest for knowledge that is called ibn al-sabīl, “son of the road,” in Islam. This journey concerns the material symbolic expressions of human being—discrete systems of representation, from art and architecture to music and literature. I am particularly concerned with how these relate to forms of sociality (community), as well as political and economic formations of power. My focus is poetic socialities, a phrase that riffs on the 11th century Islamic peripatetic philosopher ibn Sīnā’s (Avicenna’s) conception of the role poetic expression’s cognitive and affective force plays in instantiating sociality. That concept is not taught in the philosophy of aesthetics courses offered in our universities, nor in courses on the history and theory of poetics or semiotics, where it should be a fundamental element in the genealogy of both fields.

This presentation provides an account of how various populations defined by capitalist modernity as proprietary things called Negro engaged and sustained in the interstices of that world order discrete forms of para-semiotic poiēsis. What I call Black poiēsis is present in multifarious sets of practices of living that performatively expressed appositional ways of being-in-common-on-the-earth across generations. These practices are instances of what I’m calling poetic socialities, like ring shouts, spirituals, and “worldly” work songs, as well as Jubba-beating and the blues, along with dance, such as the Buzzard Lope. Carefully studying the traditions of such poetic socialities might provide us with the animative materiality with which it is possible to imagine being-earthlings; by showing not merely that there is an alternative archive of knowledge, but that careful engagement with that archive calls for a different way of thinking poetic socialities. The study of poetic socialities is committed to reimagining the field of humanities as a crucial aspect of social well-being—justice, dignity, and individual rights across the planet (what Tunisians refer to as the Revolution of Dignity.) The gesture of such a study is toward thinking-in-practice-being-in-common-on-earth.

Author

• RA Judy, University of Pittsburgh