Description
Book SynopsisRadical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism explores the long-overlooked links between black nationalist activism and the renaissance of artistic experimentation emerging from recent African American literature, visual art, and film. GerShun Avilez charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As Avilez shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with black nationalist discourses. Avilez's close readings study how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods. A bold addition to an advancing field, Radical Aesthe
Trade ReviewWilliam Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2017— Modern Language Association (MLA)
Table of ContentsCoverTitleContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Art of RevolutionPart I. The Question of "Closing Ranks"1. The Claim of Innocence: Deconstructing the Machinery of Whiteness2. The Suspicion of Kinship: Critiquing the Construct of Black UnityPart II. The Bodily Logic of "Revolutionizing the Mind"3. The Demands on Reproduction: Worrying the Limits of Gender Identity4. The Space of Sex: Reconfiguring the Coordinates of SubjectivityConclusion: Queering RepresentationNotesIndex
