Black Art and Aesthetics

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This anthology highlights emerging forms of Black aesthetics across arts, culture, and theory, offering a fresh perspective on a field gaining global interest. Black aesthetics is present in the work of artists exploring affective histories, museums addressing racial inequities, and activists advocating for social justice. It permeates streets, music venues, magazines, and cinemas, extending beyond academia. The collection features contributions from prominent figures like Angela Davis, Paul C. Taylor, Vijay Iyer, Claudine Rankine, and Kara Walker, alongside early-career practitioners and theorists. Through essays, poetry, images, and interviews, they critically examine art, culture, and aesthetic concepts rooted in social and political contexts. The anthology emphasizes aesthetic intersectionality, engaging with themes of class, queer sexuality, narrative, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality in Césaire, and connections between Afrodiasporic and Chinese classical music, as well as theories of Black post-Blackness. By redefining aesthetics to encompass all forms of sensation and perception, this collection challenges the dominant modern aesthetic tradition and fosters new ways of understanding experience, identity, and resistance, shaped not only by oppression but also by the aspiration for change.