Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics: An Open Question

Aranke, Sampada; Copeland, Huey

doi:10.1353/asa.2020.0014

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…She insisted that it is the situated, particular resources of our inherited subjectivities that provide the grounds for any confrontation with power. She trusted difference as a guide for transformative political and intellectual work, rather than seeing it as an awkward inconvenience, an embarrassment, an epiphenomenon, a ‘lane’ or a cul-de-sac (Copeland, 2020: 270). Rather than glossing over our differences because they are too risky, pacifying them by turning them into objects of study, or reifying them – she always refused any easy characterization of herself – Lorde asks us to step into the kind of serious confrontation with difference that unearths the history of the world as it plays out in our experiences and relationships and institutions.…”

Section: Kelly Gillespie: ‘The Shape Of the Future Was A Widening Sta...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A decolonial anthropology: You can dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools

Venkatesan,

Ntarangwi,

Mills

et al. 2024

Critique of Anthropology

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The 2022 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. The motion is, of course, a riff on Audre Lorde’s well-known 1984 claim that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’ Lorde is asking about the tools of a racist and constitutionally exclusionary world, but we can ask similar questions about the tools of an academic discipline, anthropology, which arose during the height of empire, and the house that anthropology has built and its location in the university. Are anthropology's tools able to dismantle a house built on oppression, exploitation and discrimination and then build a different better house? If not, then what kinds of other tools might we use, and what is it that we might want to build? The motion is proposed by David Mills and Mwenda Ntarangwi and opposed by Kelly Gillespie and Naisargi Davé with Soumhya Venkatesan convening and editing the debate for publication.

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Section: Kelly Gillespie: ‘The Shape Of the Future Was A Widening Sta...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A decolonial anthropology: You can dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools

Venkatesan,

Ntarangwi,

Mills

et al. 2024

Critique of Anthropology

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Marking Radical Aesthetics in the Time of Racial Capitalism

Gržinić

2023

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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This article examines colonialism, the regime of whiteness, and feminism; it sketches possible genealogies of theories and practices in order to design an aesthetic of radicality or a radical aesthetic that is insurgent and defiant, based on histories and knowledge. We know that aesthetics is a colonial formation that historically and currently privileges the white European bourgeois who could speculate on the beautiful and the good, while genocidal practices and slave trade were carried out from European soil in other parts of the world. Similarly, the Shoah, the still unthinkable genocide that happened on European soil in the twentieth century and shaped the European present, is still, at its base, covered by rhetorically empty constructions of aesthetic perception, practices, and theories. A radical aesthetics must realign all these categories, not only with a cynical gesture of inversion but to situate them categorically and ethically elsewhere.

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Staging Mirrors

McKee¹

2022

Liquid Blackness

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This essay deploys Lacanian psychoanalysis and Black feminist theory to assert that the prominent use of mirrors in the paintings and sculptures of Deborah Anzinger, a contemporary Kingston-based Jamaican artist, are crucial to understanding subjectivity as inextricable from tropical ecology in her practice. Within what Anzinger terms an “aesthetic syntax,” the mirror is a catalyst around which her abstract compositions—which include paint, clay, synthetic hair, and Aloe barbadensis plants—conceptualize a racialized and gendered self that emerges from the reflective interaction between queer Black femininity and Caribbean ecologies. The fluid interdependence of bodies and landscapes in these works theorizes what this essay names a black ontological dehiscence that is capable of holding the afterlives of slavery together with other, ecologically porous forms of personhood. The artworks investigate the relational property of racialized and gendered alterity and open onto a psychoanalytic field of inquiry informed by Black feminist thought to unravel the colonizing borders of intersubjectivity and blur the distinction between desire and jouissance. Placing Lacan's theorization of the mirror stage in relation to the black aesthetic of Anzinger's works situates the psychoanalytic subject within an expanded field. Attending to the environments reflected in Anzinger's mirrors reveals the ecological inflections suggested by Lacanian subjectivity but never recognized within it. Moreover, the subject's fragmented coherence before the mirror elucidates Anzinger's approach as one that embraces ontological dehiscence as an ecologically relational position materially and psychically entangled with the world.

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Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics: An Open Question

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

A decolonial anthropology: You can dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools

A decolonial anthropology: You can dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools

Marking Radical Aesthetics in the Time of Racial Capitalism

Staging Mirrors

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