Black Aesthetics and the Political Imagination

Session Submission Type: Constructed Paper Session

Abstract

These papers examine Black aesthetic and pedagogical practice as forms of political improvisation across a wide span of time — from the turn-of-the-century Black political novel through mid-century literary aesthetics to late-twentieth-century institutional critique and the founding of Black women's studies. One paper reads Sutton Griggs and James Corrothers in 1899 and 1902, finding in their scenes of forced communal laughter a technology of political organization — a rehearsal of solidarity under conditions of anti-Black violence. Another examines Baldwin and Morrison as aesthetic improvisers who resist the gravitational pull of origin narratives through naming and flight, finding in their intertextual engagement the aesthetic dimension of a longer Black struggle against colonial imposition. A third asks how Fred Wilson's and Renée Green's work in 1992 anticipated its own implication in the neoliberal production of reparative racial knowledge. The session closes with a paper on Sonia Sanchez's experimental teaching at Livingston College in 1969, reading it as the improvised founding of Black women's studies — a discipline invented in real time because no other way existed. A skilled chair will be essential for drawing out the historical arc connecting these papers.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Black Flight and Calculation in Baldwin and Morrison’s Aesthetic Resistance - Song Namgung, Auburn University

• Theater of Refusal: New Approaches to Black (Inter)Disciplinary History - Joel Terence Rhone, University of Louisiana Lafayette

• Forced Laughter and Rehearsal in Black Political Fiction - amadi I ozier, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Chair

• Kevin C. Winstead, University of Florida