Black is, Black Ain't: A Historic Prelude

g ~IPl&UWI f 0 Kerry James Marshall. Dailies (RHYTHM MASTR) (deta,1/, 2003, ,nk-jet prmrs on newsprmt, 16 pans, each: (frame): 23· Representing 318 by 29-118 inches, msra/lation d,mensions vanab/e (coortesy the anist, Jack Shainman Gallery. New York and Koplm de/ Rio Gallery. Los Angeles). Kerry James Marshall's recent work re-thinks the meaning of "black art" I BY MATTHEW BIRO 34 ARTPAPERS.ORG The timing couldn't be more opportune for "One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics:' the t raveling exhibition of Kerry James Marshall's recent work. To begin with, Marshall's show contributes richly to t he debate among curators and artists about the idea of a "post-black" aesthetics , which fo llowed from the Stud io Museum in Harlem's "Freestyle" exhibition of 200 1. 1 Moreover, how "One True Thing" develops its understanding of black art says much about t he contemporary situation.

Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal (an open-access, online, peer-reviewed journal on activism in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies), 2020

an open-access, online, peer-re ie ed journal on acti ism in riting, rhetoric, and literac studies

Afro-Brazilian Mind / A Mente Afro-Brasileira: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Criticism, 2007

Wake Forest University, 2020

Representation Matters is an utterance that is often evoked to uncover the ways globalized anti-blackness constructs forms of exclusion within media and culture. The phrase acts as a kind of perceptible measure for the assumed racial progress of civil society, as the presence of black bodies in powerful positions attempts to serve as verification that the horrors of slavery and genocide are simply the unfortunate effects of past mistakes rather than an enduring legacy of gratuitous violence. My thesis plans on analyzing how the visibility of racialized and gendered bodies, especially those made visible for entertainment, are intertwined within the ontometaphysically violent process of obliterating the Other, particularly the black nonbeing. My analysis hopes to unveil representation as a fraudulent measure for progress and examine representation as an epistemological tool that employs rhetorical arguments designed to fortify the anti-black logic that maintains civil society.My thesis will focus on how black representation within American popular culture is implicated within the politics of the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner workings of a place, institution, or group of people within an event. In addition, I reflect on critical fabulation as an in(ter)vention of the archive and representation. The practice of reimagining the black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My thesis will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of black life in events of social death.

Blackness confounds meaning. At once the condition of possibility for the emergence of modernity and the limit-case for humanity as such, Black being is enshrouded in paradoxes and aporias, posing a number of problems for thought. This course aims to foster the development of conceptual tools and reading practices with which to engage the problematic of Blackness. Mobilizing “poetics” in the broadest sense of the term—i.e., as a mode of articulation and a system of meaning—this course brings together Black critical theory and contemporary black poetry in order to think through key sites of conflict in the theorization of Blackness. Rather than offer a history of Black poetry, this course is interested in approaching poetry as a crucial node of Black critical thought. This course will pay particular attention to questions of form, genre, the archive, queerness, gender, visuality, ontology and temporality as they approach and are undone by Blackness.

Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art , 2014

The contemporary experiences of racially marginalized people in the West are affected deeply by the hegemonic capitalist Orthodox cultural codes, or episteme, in which blackness operates as the symbol of Chaos. As it relates to people of African descent, these affects are marked by a denial of the black person’s full status as an unproblematic subject, by ontological voids arising from the practice of enslavement over the past centuries, and by problems of representation within the West, where examples and points of reference for black identity are always tied up with conflicting interests. Utilizing Sylvia Wynter's model of the "ceremony" as one means of describing the ways in which blacks in the West maneuver the extant psychological and philosophical perils of race in the Western world, I argue that the history of black responses to the West's ontological violence is alive and well, particularly in art forms like spoken word, where the power to define/name oneself is of paramount importance. Focusing on how art shaped black responses to ontologically debilitating circumstances, I argue that there has always existed a model for liberation within African American culture and tradition. This work takes an approach that is philosophical and theoretical in nature in order to address the wide breadth of the black experience that lies beyond the realm of statistics. The goal of this approach is to continue the work of unraveling hidden or under-discussed aspects of the black experience in order to more clearly find possibilities for addressing problems in the construction of race and marginalized people within the Western episteme. This work attempts to redefine the struggle for a healthier ontology within the framework of a process of liberation that transcends Orthodox limitations on the marginalized subject.

Critique d’art, 2021

Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art, 2019