Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'African American aesthetics'

In the first half of the nineteenth century, historians in the United States described their work as an aesthetic practice. The romantic nationalist George Bancroft claimed that historical writing ought to provide readers with a series of beautiful images that would "secure the affections" of the American people for the U.S. Constitution. William H. Prescott, author of volumes on the age of conquest, introduced his most popular work by claiming that he wanted to present his readers with a "picture true in itself" and, through his vividly imaginative descriptions, "to surround them in the spirit of the times." For this generation of historians, their magisterial texts were not simply more or less true accounts of European experience in the New World or the story of the nation's revolutionary origins, they were paintings in words--expressionistic and romantic images that would make the passions, conflicts, and virtues of previous generations available to their readers as an imaginative experience.

Scholars have long understood the various forms of historical consciousness of the nineteenth-century as producing national, imperial, and racial orders in their imagination of the United States as the locus of a linear and progressive flowering of liberty in the New World. My project supplements these totalizing accounts by examining the central texts of nationalist history through the lens of literary analysis to demonstrate how their aesthetic dimensions both enabled and disrupted such a political and temporal imagination. Romantic history emerged in an era of pronounced temporal crisis for the United States. On the surface, these historians sought to provide readers with experiences of an otherwise inaccessible revolutionary past that would help bind a nation confronting fears about dissolution in exponential westward growth, immigration, and the sectional crisis over slavery. Yet, when we look closer at these texts, we realize that they contain covert recognitions of the vitality of struggles for freedom taking place elsewhere--in Haiti, Mexico, or West Indian abolition--that exceeded the terms of U.S. racial republicanism and claimed futures at odds with nationalism's sense of historical preeminence. Both compelled and horrified by the assertion of black freedom throughout the Atlantic world, the beautiful and haunted images of romantic history registered the irruptive force of transatlantic political movements nominally inadmissible within U.S. historical discourse.

While romantic historians developed aesthetic norms for confronting and disavowing alternatives to national orders of time and political progress, abolitionist writers held fast to these disruptions to construct an aesthetics of slave revolution. In the second half of my dissertation, I examine the trajectory of this black radical tradition from the abolitionist historians of the antebellum period to the twentieth-century thinkers who adapted and transformed these aesthetics into a comprehensive anti-imperialism. Considering writings by William C. Nell, Martin R. Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James I argue that this tradition did more than reconstruct histories of black political life that had been suppressed by white supremacist orders of knowledge. These writers vitalized history with alternate models of freedom as immediate, proliferating, and eruptive--even when they also sought for signs of racial progress in a linear model. In their vivid descriptions of an experience of freedom that was irreducible to linear models of progress, these texts produced what Walter Benjamin once described as "the constructive principle" in materialist history: "where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same." This shock of overflowing tensions is the moment when history becomes aesthetic--when imaginative excess overturns the narrative form of history. I ultimately argue that the aesthetics of history can help us reconsider the political stakes of historical scholarship, allowing us to think about the writing of history as an ongoing encounter with freedom that always exceeds the limits of factual, analytical and discursive accounts of what has been.

"Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism" considers are the aesthetic practices found in BlackPentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that began in Los Angeles, California in 1906 to argue that the aesthetic practices are the condition of possibility for a performative assessment and antiphonal criticism of normative theology and philosophy. Indeed, the history of these performances is an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the grain of liberal logics of subjectivity. By showing that theology and philosophy were abstractions of thought that produced the conceptual body as the target of racialization, the atheological-aphilosophical couplet indexes modes of intellectual practice that engulf and exceed such reductivism. BlackPentecostalism is a social, musical, intellectual form of new life, predicated upon the necessity of ongoing new beginnings. The religious practices I analyze produce a range of common sensual experiences: of "shouting" as dance; "testimony" and "tarry service" as song and praise noise; "whooping" (ecstatic, eclipsed breath) that occurs in praying and preaching; as well as, finally, "speaking in tongues." I ultimately argue that these aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.

During the antebellum era, both clergy and scholars alike levied incessant injunctions against loud singing and frenzied dancing in religion and popular culture. Calling for the relinquishment of these sensual spiritual experiences, I argue that these framing injunctions led to a condition where BlackPentecostal aesthetics, even in the much later institutional Black Studies, were and are thought as excessive performances. "Black Sacred Breath" investigates how discourses that emerged within the cauldron of spatiotemporal triangular trades in coffee, tea, sugar and human flesh of Transatlantic slavery necessitated a theology and philosophy of race, and consequently, the racializing of aesthetic practices. Over and against this discursive theology-philosophy were the performance practices of BlackPentecostalism, an atheology-aphilosophy. These sensual experiences were not merely performed through duress but were the instantiation and sign of love, of life. As love and life, these performative dances, songs, noises and tongues illustrate how enjoyment, desire and joy are important for the historicity - the theory of history found in these practices - that antiphonally speaks back against aversion, embarrassment and abandonment, against the debasement and denigration of blackness. Fundamentally, "Black Sacred Breath" is about the possibility for Black Study (as opposed to and differentiated from university institutional Black Studies), about the capacity for aesthetic practices typically deemed excessive can be constitutive, can provide new models for collective intellectual practice.

This dissertation draws on American literature from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression to fashion a theory of abandonment, a term that designates both a material reality and a conceptual framework; abandonment names what remains unincorporated into the governing economic, political, gender and racial logic. This study examines, therefore, literary representations of poverty, homelessness, forms of working-class labor, and the work that race and gender do within these conditions of existence. It arises from the intersection of the Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory that has sought not only to account for the inequitable economic distribution of goods but also to confront the deeper problem of injurious power structures and hierarchies.

The literature of abandonment discounts the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power; rather, abandonment brings to light the spatial practice of the subject’s struggle for re-signification of such structures. Thus, one can begin to conceive of the abandoned subject by asking what one produces when one inhabits a space typically deemed uninhabitable—by discovering forms of being where one’s being is impossible or illicit—because it is in this act that subjectivity for the otherwise abject becomes possible. This study asks more specifically how literature as an aesthetic practice imagines the production of an abandoned subjectivity and, by extension, alternative social, economic and political structures.

The driving question of this dissertation is, how can a concept such as abandonment allow one to address without interpellating its subject? That is, can one value the abandoned as such, without incorporating it into an injurious system of evaluation or the prevailing neoliberal discourse of recognition? This entails asking how these processes are represented as being deeply aesthetic and what the relationship is between literary form and “habitat.” That the fact of abandonment is not quite available for representation, at least not without recovering it from itself, but is available for inhabitation, is illustrated in each of the texts this dissertation examines. In bridging socioeconomic material and thematic readings with a study of literary form, this dissertation argues that literature itself performs the very calling into being and inhabitation of this spectral space; which is to say, literary form lays bare the spatial underpinnings of narrative, allowing one to enter into the currents of dispossession rather than their fixed social positions.

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.