African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity

By Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Gillespie, Rikki Byrd and 15 more

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?

Contributors: Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Gillespie, Rikki Byrd, Amber Lauren Johnson, Doria E. Charlson, Florencia V. Cornet, Daniel McNeil, Lucy Caplan, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Sammantha McCalla, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Abby Dobson, J. Michael Kinsey, Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Julie B. Johnson, Sharrell D. Luckett, Jasmine Eileen Coles, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Rickerby Hinds.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684481545

Book preview

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SERIES EDITOR FOREWORD

The Griot Institute at Bucknell University is most delighted to introduce this latest publication in our Griot Project Book Series, in partnership with Bucknell University Press and Rutgers University. The griot is a central figure in many West African cultures. Historically, the griot held many functions, including as a community historian, cultural critic, indigenous artist, and collective spokesperson. Borrowing from this rich tradition, the Bucknell University Griot Institute for Africana Studies and the Griot Project Book Series define the griot as a metaphor for scholarly and creative interdisciplinary exploration of the arts, literatures, and cultures of African America, Africa, and the African diaspora. Building on that construct, the Griot Project Book Series consists of scholarly monographs and creative works devoted to the interdisciplinary exploration of the aesthetic, artistic, and cultural products and intellectual currents of historical and contemporary African America and of the African diaspora using narrative as a thematic and theoretical framework for the selection and execution of its projects. African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity directly contributes to the mission and the growing list of published titles in the series.

This collection originated from two Griot programs. In spring 2016, the Griot Institute held a lecture/conversation series rooted in questions about the intersections of identity, race, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and activism as they affect and inform a wide range of African American artistic expressions. The series had two main focal points. One was a scholarly conversation showcasing James Baldwin’s astute and uncompromising analysis of institutional forms of racism, heteronormative sexuality, and anti-body sentiments found in dominant religious systems and tenets of his day. The other was an extended conversation with leading African American artists about their creative journeys in light of the contemporary structural realities of the United States, particularly as they concern artistic expression and racism and the intersections of aesthetic, economic, sociological, and psychological inequality. Each of the artists presenting used Baldwin’s legacy as a springboard for conversations about their own work and processes, as well as their intersections with issues of social justice.

As a follow-up to the series and its fertile conversations, the Griot Institute sponsored a conference, African-American Arts: Activism and Aesthetics, in the fall of 2016. The conference brought together emerging and leading artists and scholars, including Ntozake Shange and Jimmy Greene to reflect upon the relationship between African American arts, activism, and aesthetics. African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity expands upon and deepens the conversation initiated at the conference. A major highlight of the conference and collection are the photographs included here by MacArthur Award–winning photographer Carrie Mae Weems, one of the most acclaimed and recognized American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She served as the keynote speaker for the conference and has generously agreed to open the volume with a series of her most recent photographs, in conversation with the wide-ranging essays and critical analyses that comprise the collection. She is the exemplar of the African American artist/activist.

In Weems’s keynote address for the conference, she defined herself as an outlier, an individual for whom working to making change is not optional, but an indivisible part of her constitution. This status, she remarked, can result in creative and physical isolation. Identifying the isolation of the activist/artist is an endemic problem. Weems expressed gratitude for those with whom her vision and purpose overlap, those whose work and vision mediate and deconstruct for her the very construct of isolation. Some compatriots she noted as particularly essential to her are Barack Obama, Toni Morrison, Nina Simone, Martin Puryear, and Félix González-Torres. Through their intersections, Weems expressed her embrace of a kinship with these artists/activists and others. They have provided what she explained as a way to understand the terrain that [she] walks on. She made the point that although artists often work in isolation, they are not creatively alone. They are in each other’s company and influence. Weems referenced her breakthrough Kitchen Table series and alluded to the ways in which it emerged from her engagement with conversations about representation of the black female form as well as critical race theory. In so doing, Weems provides insight into the processes through which activism, artistic practice, and aesthetic engagements are three indistinguishable strands in a braid that cannot be undone. Fundamental to this weaving are the difficult questions that are at the core of Weems’s work, questions whose pondering becomes a mandatory labor for both her and her audience.

A central point about Weems and her work was clear: her activism is not formulaic or predictable; neither is her work. She made a critical point about the ways that those writing about her work often remark that it is focused on issues of race and gender. As she noted, that is a too narrow description. For her, the question at the center of her art is about power and its manifestations and consequences, particularly in regard to systems of power. She also demonstrated that her work is not just about making so-called high art but also involves work in her community. Weems has created a community organization for young people in Syracuse, where she lives. The young people who are involved in her organization, called the Institute of Sound and Style, learn about producing art, and a small group of them work directly with her on her projects.

Fittingly, then, African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity begins with Weems’s photographs. These photographs are an excerpt from a larger project featuring singer and actor Mary J. Blige and were created by Weems in conjunction with W Magazine’s 2017 Art Issue. In addition to the photographs, which feature Blige as a figure of royalty, the spread in the magazine also consists of a conversation between Weems and Blige about topics as varied as the complexities of black female representation, the challenges of self-reflection, and the costs and freedoms of living and producing as an artist. In this self-reflexive communion between the two, Weems intervenes in the historical legacy of visual denigration of Black women’s physicality, efficacy, value, and dignity. She both literally and figuratively crowns Blige and, in so doing, demonstrates the conjunctions of Black activism with careful, intellectual, astute, and exquisite Black artistry.

Through her body of work, Weems’s practice engages and challenges us to consider the complex questions surrounding art, activism, and aesthetics for Black artists and graces this publication with an ideal springboard from which to commence exploration of this collection.

Carmen Gillespie

Griot Project Book Series Editor

August 2019

VISUAL FOREWORD

BY CARRIE MAE WEEMS

FIGURE 0.1. Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Anointed). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

FIGURE 0.2. Carrie Mae Weems. The Blues Grid. 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

FIGURE 0.3. Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Mary J. Blige). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

FIGURE 0.4. Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Mary J. Blige). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

FIGURE 0.5. Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Mary J. Blige). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTS

INTRODUCTION

African American Arts in Action

SHARRELL D. LUCKETT

African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity is a culmination of critical essays and presentations primarily prepared for the Griot Institute for Africana Studies’ convening on African American art, activism, and aesthetics held in fall 2016 at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. An ongoing conference series that features scholarship addressing African American art in diverse disciplines, this particular conference served as a module and model of a range of artistic expression in response to the history and triumphs of African American peoples. As a presenter and attendee at these events, I had the pleasure of sharing a space with renowned artists such as the late, venerable Ntozake Shange, saxophonist Jimmy Greene, and celebrated mixed media artist and MacArthur Genius Fellow Carrie Mae Weems. Notably, I witnessed a range of entryways and insights from scholars and aesthetes on the importance of African American artists and their global impact. The conference proved to be an inspiration and auspicious gathering orbiting African American arts and activism. Relative to this conference, African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity is an additional platform for the conference attendees and others who are interested in similar discourses to articulate the importance of African American arts and to envision a future with sustained success for African American peoples. This anthology brings together voices and scholarship from various fields, such as fashion, performance studies, dance, visual art, queer studies, theatre, and music to address the role of art in African American culture and Black people’s lived experiences in the United States. The authors of these essays witness the continuation of African American contributions in the United States and abroad while looking to the future to mark substantive possibilities for their research. The contents of this anthology also signal the rich investments that contemporary artists have made to critique the political landscape, and what now seems to be the normalized divestment and disruption of Black ontologies. Interpreting and understanding artistry as critical celebrations, the collection herein evidences the perennial need for art and art-makers to remain central to social justice advocacy.

In the United States, 2016 marked the exit of the Obama administration; the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC; and sonic releases from artists such as Solange, claiming, in various ways, their rightful seat at the table. Indeed, artists ranging from orators to architects to musicians continue to respond in innovative and audacious ways to celebrate Black culture, while at the same time addressing the attempted expulsion of Black being. In many ways, this anthology serves as a literary extension of what Christina Sharpe has termed wake work, work that is a theory and praxis of Black being in diaspora.¹ In Chapter 1 of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe (2016) shares myriad definitions of wake, which she then reads alongside Black resistance, Black death, and Black artistry. In conversation with Sharpe’s work and several other cultural studies scholars, this anthology serves as a critical compilation from artists/scholars who are always-already working in and around acts of freedom-making. Significantly, the work herein investigates various modes of artistry that negate Black exclusion while canonizing (re)readings and articulations of diverse ways in which African Americans have addressed quotidian dangers and unfound grievances toward their blackness and being.

In reference to Black identity, it is important to note that in this compendium African American and Black are used interchangeably, though, depending on the context, the words can signal different identities. In Black Performance Theory, Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (2014) acknowledge this interchangeability of terms as they note that monikers used to designate black presence, such as African, Black, or African American, represents a context for packaging ideas about black people in particular places and during particular historical time periods.² They further offer that Black and African American can represent resistant, dissident self-namings in response to political activism of the latter part of the twentieth century,³ while acknowledging that black has stabilized an international identity of diasporan consciousness.⁴ Likewise, honing in on the specificity of phenotypical perceptions of blackness, in Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer (2017) offer ruminations on what it means to look Black, suggesting that looking Black is often determined by donning specific hair textures, such as kinky or loosely coiled, to having very dark to olive light skin tones combined with features of African and white European ancestry.⁵ And though this type of racial classification is often problematic, the subjects discussed in this anthology are indeed perceived as Black in a U.S. and global context. In addition, their artistry is/was also cultivated primarily in the United States, though some have indelible African American transnational orientations, as found in the chapters by Florencia V. Cornet, Genevieve Hyacinthe, and Doria Charlson, where they theorize the work of Josefina Báez, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Pearl Primus, respectively. And while the authors of the essays are ethnically and racially diverse, the artistry discussed in this book can be coded and perceived as African American art or Black art since it was borne of individuals identified as Black or African American.

With a keen interest in the value and agency of African American art, the essay contributors join a long list of African Americans and African American allies who have walked before them and found voice in a seemingly doomed and desolate environment; while still managing to celebrate African American existence first, and not always in reaction to the other. Specifically, the authors here are involved in the work of blackness. In writing about blackness and governance, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten offered that

blackness still has work to do: to discover the re-routing encoded in the work of art: in the anachoreographic reset of a shoulder, in the quiet extremities that animate a range of social chromaticisms and, especially, in the mutations that drive mute, labored, musicked speech as it moves between an incapacity for reasoned or meaningful self-generated utterance that is, on the one hand, supposed and, on the other hand, imposed, and a critical predisposition to steal (away).⁶

In other words, this anthology anchors itself in a place that might be betwixt and between the not yet solved and the unsolvable, the never broken and the unbreakable, the dream deferred and the daydreamer. Borrowing from Childish Gambino, many of these essays function as a clarion call to not only wake up (upending from an induced, albeit conscious sleep—a state of un(rest)), but to stay woke.⁷

This anthology is because the United States should continue looking to artistry and artists’ innate abilities to help solve what seem like immutable equations that surface in the American experience related to race and other intersectional factors, such as class, size, and gender. Artistry must be at the forefront of revolution while elevating Black lives and Black material culture, and contemporaneously invoking the doing of activist work.

Since the beginning of time, it seems, art has been endemic to African peoples, as they created sculptures, relics, body tattoos, and ritual playscripts, among other things, in relation to religion and ritual in ancient Africa. In the 2017 PBS documentary Africa’s Great Civilizations, Henry Louis Gates Jr. visits the African continent, the birthplace of human civilization according to anthropological scholars.⁸ He then speaks with several scientists from around the globe who, based on their research, assert and uphold the belief that the human race began in ancient Africa; artistic expression, confirmed by Gates, was a central part of their culture. It seems that art, in various mediums, was most important in carrying out rituals. Wole Soyinka goes so far as to say one’s existence is inextricably linked to ritual theatre as he offers, Ritual theatre . . . establishes the spatial medium not merely as a physical area for simulated events but as a manageable contraction of the cosmic envelope within which man—no matter how deeply buried such a consciousness has latterly become—fearfully exists.⁹ Though Soyinka is specifically referencing theatre, one must understand that theatre often includes many art forms, such as acting, dance, visual art, mediated art, singing, and dramatic literature, serving as an ideal discipline for these fields to converge. Hence, it is no surprise that during and after the transatlantic slave trade, art (broadly defined) still surfaced as an important part of West African culture in the United States. And as several generations passed, art remained not only critical to African American religion and ritual, but also became a central vehicle for activist activities that advanced the lives of African descendants in America. For instance, activism is found in the writing of William Wells Brown, the first Black man to have a play published in America. Brown’s play, The Escape; or a Leap for Freedom (1858), recounts factual, horrific events of slavery and ends with an enslaved man, who appears dedicated to his White enslaver, escaping to Canada. Activism is prevalent when W.E.B. Du Bois, in his 1926 speech at the NAACP, suggested to African Americans that a turn toward artistry could possibly liberate them. Du Bois offered, Here [artistry] is a way out. Here [artistry] is the real solution of the color problem. The recognition accorded Cullen, Hughes, Fauset, White and others shows there is no real color line.¹⁰ And though Alain Locke understandably disagreed with Du Bois as to how Black artistry should be audienced, Locke also felt that art should be cultivated and that art, as a form of self-expression, is fundamentally an outgrowth of vigorous, flourishing living.¹¹ Locke was acknowledging that the creation of art evidences a propensity toward leading a fulfilling life. Further, post–Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston published the Characteristics of Negro Expression, an essay that ties African American being to artistic expression.¹² Since then, African American artists have continued to use their artistry as activism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as seen in the Black Arts and the Black Lives Matter movements. Thus, this anthology continues evidencing ways in which art infused with activism, and vice versa, is endemic to African American culture, as artistic expression has almost always been employed and deployed to advance and sustain the lives of Black peoples.

ACTIVISM, AESTHETICS, AND FUTURITY

This anthology explores and critiques African American artistry in relation to activism, aesthetics, and futurity, three multifaceted notions that resist singularity, though together they make up the subject matter addressed herein.

When writing about playwright Charles Fuller’s contributions to the arts, Molefi Kete Asante offered that being both Black and living in the United States can be seen as a paradox.¹³ Asante noted that the very act of living is in contestation with being Black. The living that Asante is referencing correlates with thriving mental and spiritual health and experiencing a true meritocracy, all components that Black people are often denied simply because they are Black. Black people in the United States are only intermittently afforded opportunities and access to resources that might allow them to live their best lives. And the unwarranted assaults on Black bodies further diminish their chances to thrive in the United States. Yet, Asante reminds us that African Americans in the past and present have often used artistry to refute, upend, or erase this paradox altogether, as he praised Fuller as an artistic exemplar who understands this paradox and creates out of it, fusing together the parts of [Black people’s] experiences, contradictions and misgivings, with the hopes and desires in a way that resolves [their] most critical issues.¹⁴ Fuller, like many of the subjects in this anthology, calls upon creativity to address social injustices and perhaps improve the living conditions of African Americans in the United States.

Activism is understood as a type of action that has the express intent to address, highlight, and/or curtail actions that are unjustly harming a person or another entity. There are many ways to be involved in activism, including mobilizing bodies and/or creating art to address said grievances. In her essay "Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969), Bridget Cooks highlights the community activism of 1969 that occurred in Harlem when Black Harlem artists were excluded from participating in an exhibition about their own community at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here, Cooks associates activism with community movement and notes how the artists’ mobilization showed the increasingly powerful role of oppressed communities to organize their voices against blatant omissions, disrespectful treatment, and cultural misrepresentation by art museums in the United States.¹⁵ Of course, this type of activist work was not unique to visual artists, as artists practicing in other areas, such as theatre, journalism, or dance, have also organized in various ways to address oppression and persistent marginalization, and are still involved in this type of activist work today. Activism, like the kind Cooks wrote about, also invokes community, or the happening of congregation—a community that serves as a support system and safety net anchored in effecting change. The Cooks essay serves as one example, albeit a notable example, of how Black artists have historically turned to collective activism to address oppression. It can also be argued that activism and social justice in the African American community are inextricably linked because in most instances their forms of activism are to guarantee safety, civil rights, and other forms of equitability. In addition, social justice can be thought of as the effect of acts of conciliation, fair practices, reconciliation, or reparations in some form, eventually impacting public policy, legislation, and juridical matters in favor of the oppressed. And as highlighted in this anthology, Black artists have often used the arts as the mode or vehicle to advocate for social justice or bring social justice issues to the attention of a community. In this way, many of the essays in this anthology have some form of social justice framing or viewpoint, whether it’s advocating for queer communities to receive proper artistic credits as found in J. Michael Kinsey’s chapter or investigating the implications and impact of the disapproval of trap gospel music in the Black church, as found in Sammantha McCalla’s chapter.

According to Gordon Graham, author of Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics, aesthetics are often concerned with the attributes of what constitutes art and the ways in which art gains value.¹⁶ He goes on to say that philosophy of art (or aesthetics) is directly relevant to the study, appreciation and practice of the arts.¹⁷ Hence, aesthetics is often concerned with the mode or medium a creative is working in and theoretical inquiries into the art, including the guiding methodological principles. Graham also acknowledges that theorists taking up questions of aesthetics come from all sorts of fields, such as musicology and sociology.¹⁸ Imbued with this understanding, it makes sense for the essays in this book to address or interrogate the aesthetics of a subject or subject matter. By engaging with the aesthetics of their artistic topics, the authors are acknowledging that the contributions of African Americans, their supporting institutions, and Black theory are invaluable in cultivating powerful sociocultural manifestations writ large; and the essays in this book take up the manifestation of art in several forms. To boot, the chapter contributors address future directions of the studied subject, or they address actions that have already been implemented to ensure continual dissemination of said artistic creation(s). Discussing futurity within these chapters honors the projected and endless contributions of African American arts to society, and might also signal new epistemologies borne of Black thought and theory. The scope of the chapters primarily focus on U.S. reactions and reflections. In total, this anthology serves as an archive of research in African American artistic studies that take up questions involving activism, aesthetic exploration, and new possibilities for African American arts.

Though there are several books that focus on the role of the arts as it relates to African American U.S. cultural production, the majority of these books focus solely or primarily on the visual arts. For instance, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Tate Publishing, 2017) focuses on the years 1963–1983. In this book, American art history is surveyed as it relates to ignored histories of Black artists living in the twentieth century. This book also discusses the role of museums relative to the debates of the period and visual art’s relation to the Black Arts Movement.¹⁹ Other books, such as African-American Art (Oxford University Press, 1998) by Sharon Patton and African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, The Civil Rights Era, and Beyond (Skira Rizzoli, 2012) by Richard Powell and Virginia Mecklenburg also focus solely on visual art. African American Art and Artists (University of California Press, 1990 and 2003) by Samella Lewis is a valuable but dated book that provides context for Black artists from the eighteenth century up until the end of the twentieth century. And though Black Popular Culture (New Press, 1992), edited by Gina Dent, is a well-known anthology that discusses Blacks and the arts, it was published almost thirty years ago, and of course much has happened in the Black arts community since 1992. To add, Black Popular Culture has a focus on culture, framed by Black joy and Black pleasure, but the chapters are not entirely focused on art in the Black community. One of the more recent books that includes inquiries into African American art is Black Performance Theory (2014), edited by Tommy F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. Developed out of several annual convenings of Black artists, called the Black Performance Theory Group, the book takes up a vast range of Black artistry, but it does not have an express focus on activism and futurity. This is not to say that activism and futurity isn’t touched upon in DeFrantz and Gonzalez’s volume; however, their primary focus involves Black performance as theory and method. Therefore, African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity positions itself as the most recent anthology to explore a vast range of Black artistry in the twenty-first century with a keen focus on activism, aesthetics, and futurity. Here, diverse voices highlight African American art and culture in several fields, such as the staged activist work in concert with the Black Lives Matter movement, the application of Transfuturism as methodology in the arts, and critiques on black fashion as activism, as found in Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Amber Johnson, and Rikki Byrd’s chapters, respectively. In this anthology, the authors collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive of the arts as part of the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that epistemological construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we, as scholars and creatives, employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society? Offering timely, innovative perspectives on the role of the arts and activism within the context of African American fashion, media, theatre, dance, visual art, music, literature, performance, and other art forms, African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity is a necessary collection that illustrates how one has or how one might approach the use of African American artistry to promote social change, conciliatory moments, and freedom acts.

ORGANIZATION

African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity opens with a visual foreword from mixed media artist Carrie Mae Weems. Weems served as the keynote speaker for the African-American Art: Activism and Aesthetics 2016 conference; thus, it is apropos for her to catalyze this anthology. Preceding this photography installation is a note from conference planner, book series editor, and Griot Institute director Carmen Gillespie, who introduces Weems’s contribution and shares how Weems’s work and presence blessed a great gathering of artists and scholars at the conference, and now readers of this book.

Following Weems’s visual foreword, the chapters in the anthology are arranged in three sections: Bodies of Activism, Music and Visual Art as Activism, and Institutions of Activism. Bodies of Activism includes essays that address forms of activism in direct relation to the physical body, and how the physical body manifests as activism itself. Music and Visual Art as Activism focuses on representations of sonic and traditional visual art, while Institutions of Activism shares the work of organizations and collectives that have social justice agendas that speak to the lived experiences of African Americans in the United States.

Just as this anthology opens with the work of Carrie Mae Weems, an artistic offering from another esteemed artist-scholar serves as the Afterword. Blackballin’ is a play written by hip hop theatre pioneer and professor of playwriting Rickerby Hinds. Hinds emigrated from Honduras to Los Angeles at the age of thirteen, and since entering the academy as a student and then professor, his critically acclaimed plays have been read and staged nationally and abroad. Blackballin’ takes a unique look at the lives of black athletes in the United States and their commodification in the sports industry. With this play, Hinds questions the expense of Black performance in sports, taking it directly to the male body, while highlighting the tenuous relationship between the quest for economic mobility and corporeal sacrifice.

Bodies of Activism

Black bodies and their comportment hold history and unfathomable treasures still unearthed. This section connects directly to the flesh of Black folks and the ways in which they inhabit, negotiate, identify, mark, or carve out safe spaces. At once rooted in the quotidian and magical, the bodies discussed in this section take up a range of artistic expression, such as fashion, transformation, and staged musicality. With a focus on weighted bodies of blackness and how they might perform within the context of African Americanness and art, a historicity of African American culture is added to an ever-growing and evolving field of Black art and performance.

Bodies of Activism opens with Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism, wherein Amber Johnson positions Transfuturism as an aesthetic antidote to systemic oppression. Suggesting Afrofuturism is an analytic solvent to canonical exception and hyperinvisibility, Johnson offers Transfuturism as an ontological praxis that foregrounds trans identities as shape shifters and boundary breakers with(in) and beyond Afrofuturism. Highlighting Transfuturism’s theoretical implications in artistic practice by sharing their work with photography and media, Johnson expands notions and social codes of trans identities that might serve to anchor a utopian performative of embodied and intersubjective futures. Ultimately, Johnson points toward a future where Transfuturism enables one to reimagine gender in ways that promote diversity and freedom.

Next, in Designing Our Freedom: Toward a New Discourse on Fashion as a Strategy for Self-Liberation, Rikki Byrd focuses our attention on the fashion industry as she highlights how three key African American figures between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries used fashion and body imagery as forms of liberation and subversion of perceived notions of blackness. Deftly marking the work of Elizabeth Keckley, Patrick Kelley, and Kerby Jean-Raymond, Byrd makes an important contribution to fashion studies, African American studies, and American studies as she argues that Black fashion studies is central to the study of Black activism in the United States. She does this by highlighting three figures’ significant contributions to fashion and mapping how they tackled racism and oppression through artistic fashioning of bodies.

In Chapter 3, Doria E. Charlson offers an informative look into the work of Pearl Primus, a transcontinental dancer known for her activist work through movement. This chapter shares how Primus’s repertoire helped to catalyze foundations for the civil rights movement and the Black Arts movement. Charlson asserts that Primus’s dance work can be seen as embodied history and that her choreography challenged racial and structural barriers for Black people. By outlining Primus’s activist work in West African and African American movement, Charlson identifies ways in which Primus helped to mobilize racial justice cohorts and highlights her legacy within and beyond the dance world; a legacy that continues to influence art-making and artistry of various mediums.

The transnational convergence of Josefina Báez’s identities and their visibility in her solo play Domincanish (2000) are explored in Chapter 4. With in-depth analyses of Báez’s play and her cultural influences, Florencia V. Cornet interrogates the interdependent relationship of African American arts and international Black cultures, specifically focusing on the U.S. (New York) and Caribbean (Dominican Republic) heritages. Cornet considers the vast and complex identities of people of African descent and how investigating their artistic work and transcontinental influences provides modes and functions of self-proclamation, survival tactics, and celebration of an expansive African American identity. She suggests that purposely connecting with transnational histories of blackness could possibly foster creative new ways of individual and collective liberation and psychic freedom.

In Chapter 5, Daniel McNeil investigates the important work of film critic Armond White, as he discusses how White upheld the highest standards of critique. Drawing a clear picture of Armond White’s career influences and his trajectory to inimitable contrarian writer, McNeil unveils how White, through his often unpopular critiques, demanded the utmost quality and analyses of Black representation in the media. McNeil also shows how White was eventually blackballed from being hailed as a top critic seemingly due to his searing reflections on the ill-informed, supposedly positive critiques of Black films by top White critics at traditional and online film critiquing platforms. As McNeil ushers the reader through several of White’s controversial critiques of popular films, such as 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, and Black Panther, he also reveals how Armond White’s work has historically rejected perceived binaries and sussed through human contradiction by documenting the politics of myriad films. Significantly, McNeil’s chapter positions White’s film critiques as complex nuances of legible activism that demand further investigation.

Closing out the Bodies of Activism section is "Race and History on the Operatic Stage: Caterina Jarboro Sings Aida." Here, Lucy Caplan traces the operatic career of Caterina Jarboro, while reading Jarboro’s contributions alongside the racial genealogy of the role of Aida. Focusing on Jarboro’s feat as the first Black woman to perform with a major U.S. opera company, Caplan argues that Jarboro’s performance had a lasting impact on the racial politics of opera in the United States. Through a close reading of both Black audience reception and White audience reception, Caplan postulates that Aida eventually served as a groundbreaking opportunity for Black women while simultaneously constraining how and where their performative contributions to opera might be staged.

Music and Visual Art as Activism

Sonic and artistically embodied vocations have always made space for celebration, liberation, and resistance. As far back as history will allow, music and art have been a part of African diasporic culture, resonating in the minds of many as epistemologies of healing, worship, affirmation, and universal lovemaking. The chapters in this section follow in this tradition by highlighting ways that African American arts and artists have influenced humanity and engendered activism through music and art, broadly construed. In this section, contributors lean in to artistic offerings from artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Messy Mya, and gospel artist Erica Campbell.

We begin with Genevieve Hyacinthe’s engagement with the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Through replete analysis of several of Basquiat’s paintings and close readings of how Basquiat’s work undoubtedly influenced (un)gendered presentations of self in the careers of Young Thug and Kanye West, Hyacinthe considers new inquiries into Basquiat’s work, such as the performance of diverse Black masculinities and gender performance in hip hop as tools to tackle injustices. In addition, Hyacinthe draws on the work of other painters, such as Tintoretto, to further outline how Basquiat’s art supports various forms of Black artistic expression in several mediums. Throughout, Hyacinthe strategically maps Basquiat’s deployment of gender fluidity and black masculine sexual alterity [as] activism—a radical, political act—positioning his heterogenenous black masculinity as a ‘royal’ standard.

The influence of trap gospel and respectability politics of Black churchgoers is discussed in Chapter 8. Sammantha McCalla highlights a railing against respectability politics in gospel music by an analysis of I Luh God by Erica Campbell, half of the famed gospel duo Mary, Mary. As McCalla turns our attention to a newer, understudied, and contested form of gospel music, she shows how the criminalization of Black language and vernacular leads to a disowning and disavowal of I Luh God by some churchgoers because they are reading the song through a colonial White dominant discourse. Commenting on the lineage of Kirk Franklin, one of Campbell’s contemporaries who also took risks in gospel music, McCalla posits that a song encompassing popular hip hop aesthetics and Black southern vernacular, such as I Luh God, actually enables the church to welcome diverse blackness and trap gospel music without reservation. McCalla advocates for a dismantling of respectability politics in the church, particularly the ways in which vernacular has historically determined how Black church communities respond to gospel music and vet Black people as incredible or credible citizens.

In Chapter 9, Nettrice R. Gaskins shares the historical significance and cultural resonance of the cosmogram, or dikenga, that for centuries has been considered a map of the cosmos. Understood as figures and symbols that are central to the Kongo people in West Central Africa, cosmograms have been employed in Black artistry for hundreds of years. In her (re)readings of contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Houston Conwill, Gaskins employs cosmograms, read through an Afrofuturist lens, as an analytic to interpret and articulate the work of these Black artists. As she offers ways in which cosmograms signal unending possibilities and manifestations in Black art, Gaskins argues that cosmograms should be used as a foundation and guide for the exploration and analysis of African American creative expression.

Positioning herself as a performance artist who explores how sonic based performative art can function as a civic tool for empathy cultivation to promote and model transformative social change in Chapter 10, Abby Dobson offers substantive examples of the ways in which her compositions employ activism and intersectional analyses of the collective lived experiences of Black women. Here, Dobson reflects upon inspirations, including marching and sharing space with like-minded activists and serving as the artist-in-residence with the African American Policy Forum, that influenced two of her musical compositions. In this essay, one learns about the influences that led Dobson to write Say Her Name, a song that supports the Say Her Name movement and specifically complements the Black Lives Matter movement in its relation to fighting state-sanctioned violence against Black people, particularly Black women. In addition, Dobson critiques Beyoncé’s recent turn toward fusing her artistry with activism and politics. Though she applauds Beyonce’s efforts, Dobson offers that Beyonce’s socially conscious artistry fails to offer transformative change because of its insufficient intersectionality.

In Chapter 11, J. Michael Kinsey positions shade as theory and the act of throwing shade as a disidentification. Situating this chapter as a read in line with Black radical tradition and drawing primarily upon the work of José Esteban Muñoz and the artistry of Big Freedia and Messy Mya, Kinsey illuminates and critiques queer aesthetics employed in Beyoncé’s Formation video. Here, Kinsey highlights the erasure of Black queer artists’ contributions to pop culture, ultimately urging this particular community to claim their artistry and call out the perpetual appropriation of their artistic creations in pop culture without due credit or compensation. To that end, Kinsey offers A Meditation on Shade as he shares details about his solo show, The Kids, to further articulate the act of shade and its intersecting implications in contemporary Black radical