The aesthetic character of blackness / Jemma DeCristo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

DeCristo, Jemma, 1986- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African American aesthetics.

Aesthetics, Black--Philosophy.

Aesthetics, Black.

African Americans--Music--Philosophy and aesthetics.

African Americans.

African American art.

Critical race theory.

Arts and society--History--20th century.

Arts and society.

Place of Publication:

Duke University Press

Summary:

"The Aesthetic Character of Blackness seeks to fundamentally change how Black representation is understood and theorized. By drawing upon the nineteenth century "discovery" and establishment of Black music during the legal waning of the slave plantation, Jemma DeCristo theorizes how Black art becomes a lofty engine of humanization that liberates the free world but does not and cannot liberate Black people. This emerging formalized Black cultural production is tracked through the writings of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alaine Lock and as well as the contemporary aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor W. Adorno. DeCristo tracks Black music's representational and anti-representational capacities in projects of black non/humanization from nineteenth century abolitionism, the founding of the recording industry, the emergence of Black queer blues performers, the rise of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960's, and aims to theorize the contemporary neo-liberalization of Black audio-visual spectacle in post-1960's Black art"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Black Art against Black People

Emancipating the Space of Sonic Capture

More Nearly Members of the Family: The Ugly Hiss

Ma Rainey's Phonograph

Music Against the Subject

Sounds Like Us: On Beautification

Self-Defense Against Density

ISBN:

1-4780-6140-5