Theater of Refusal: New Approaches to Black (Inter)Disciplinary History

• In Event: Black Aesthetics and the Political Imagination

Abstract

This paper asks how black aesthetic objects have anticipated their implication in the neoliberal period's production of reparative racial knowledge. Revisiting Fred Wilson’s Re:claiming Egypt (1992) and Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992), Joel attends to the incorporation of these works into Charles Gaines’s 1993 Theater of Refusal and the logic of how the exhibit arranges these and other artworks: posted next to each work are critical excerpts intended to spotlight tensions between critics’ raced readings of these objects and what we might take as the meanings these objects articulate themselves. These misapprehensions of its objects’ meanings are made constitutive of the exhibit itself.

Joel reads Gaines’s exhibit as an example of how black aesthetic objects have staged their conscription to the forms of racial repair that took shape in the post-Civil Rights Movement decades. He approaches these instances of black aesthetic dissonance not as a matter of the resonances that inhere in these objects themselves but as one of spatial and discursive situatedness.

Biographical Information

Joel Rhone is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. He researches and writes on post-45 American literary history and aesthetic theory, with specific interests in encounters between African American writers and decolonial movements during the early Cold War and the cultural production of racial knowledge in the late twentieth century. Public-facing pieces of Joel’s writing have appeared in The Drift magazine, The Point, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Author

• Joel Terence Rhone, University of Louisiana Lafayette