An invitation to be: What is aesthetics for the non-human?

• In Event: (Re)visions of American Selves: U.S. Mass Culture and its Exclusions

Abstract

Since the official release of the promotional images for Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter Album,
featuring the singer on a horse holding an American flag, there have been debates on larger
implications of Beyonce’s aesthetic choices as it pertains to claiming Americanness. This image
and the popular discourse it engendered, points to critical questions of Black claims to the
American empire, the stakes of such claims and the ability for one to be within the nation and yet
outside of it. Drawing on the tensions surrounding the aesthetic participation of Black people in
the project of the American empire, this paper examines the shifting aesthetic formulations of the
entanglements between Black artists and the hold of Americanness. Taking seriously Addison
Gayle Jr’s 20th century argument that to be a negro artist is work in the favor of deAmericanization and a denunciation of America, I explore the (im) possibilities of this deAmericanness while within the nation as it appears in black cinema, specifically, in Daughters of
the Dust (Julie Dash 1991) and They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor, 2023), two films where the
choice of participation in and departure from comes under question. Through these films, I
highlight both the resistance against the nation and the position of the “non-choice” which
muddles the aesthetic presentations of de-Americanization. In doing so, I trace the phantasmic
desires to be both within and outside of the national fabric, and the aesthetic articulation,
realization and or failure of these desires. If being American is an identity that is antigrammatical with blackness, then this paper draws out how the grammars of Black film produce a visual language for articulating this crisis of being or not being

Author

• Osarugue Otebele, University of California, Berkeley