Description
Book SynopsisAn artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture
In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the proper depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionisma representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation.
Arguing against the need for positive representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultu
Trade Review
[C]ompelling. It shows how art can be a powerful instrument for reflecting how a social identity can be made to assume a certain social meaning and how it can be used to question the identity in this way making it malleable to transformation. Anyone interested in identity representation and culture, particularly of an ethnic or racial nature, will find much to inform and challenge them in Harpers tightly argued and well-referenced book. * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
Opens up possibilities for revising our notions of representation.Abstractionist Aestheticsis a valuable contribution to ongoing conversations about race, politics, and aesthetics. * ASAP/Journal *
A riveting polemic on the politics of abstraction in black art. Moving among examples in a range of medialiterature, music, visual art, and filmwith fine-tuned readings,Abstractionist Aestheticsis a devastating critique of the all-too-common presumption that variants of realism are the only effective option for a black art that would respond to the history of racial deprivation. -- Brent Hayes Edwards,author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalis
Beautifully argued with unexpected twists and turns, Phillip Brian Harper exposes how our prefabricated notions of the sounds, sights, and feeling of blackness dictate our often parochial reactions to artistic efforts to engage and broaden the places assigned to black Americans. A momentous and magnificent book. -- Michael Awkward, Gayl Jones Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture, University of Michigan
