Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics

Abstract

To gather together is an act of generosity, to identify and to connect pieces from here and there in order to give them meaning and structure so as to point to some linkage, configuration or coherence—but to do so without forgetting disparity, heterogeneity, and incoherence. In his deeply important work, Black is Beautiful, A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, Paul C. Taylor engages in this careful act of gathering together, what, following Stuart Hall, Taylor calls an “assembly” of “black aesthetics,” what he defines as the “practice of using art, criticism, or analysis to explore the role that expressive objects and practices play in creating and maintaining black life-worlds” (3–6). He understands the “black” of black aesthetics in light of common-sense race-thinking in which black refers to those “who have been racially positioned as black, and to the life-worlds that these people have constructed” (11).Taylor skillfully assembles the components of a black aesthetics in “connection to the wider problematic of racial formation under white supremacy” (5). His project is thus in part a response to an ocular regime dominated by the whitely eye that has been constructed by ideologies and racial formations that denigrate, undermine, and make invisible bodies of color, specifically black bodies. This is the eye habituated not to see blackness or to see it as merely an object or a subject of ugliness, and deployed in what, following Monique Roelofs's analysis of aesthetic racialization and Saidiya Hartmman's notion of racial performance, Taylor understands as the “race-aesthetic” nexus. Informed by this race-aesthetics nexus Taylor finds it necessary to carry out a philosophical investigation to study the link between black aesthetics and philosophy, thus offering not an empirical investigation on the debt of diasporic practices to African sources or a critical analysis of specific art objects, but rather a meta-theoretical investigation as well as what we might call a theoretical-phenomenological analysis that discloses and clarifies the traditional questions of art theory in the analytic tradition (authenticity, beauty, ethical criticism) as well as the embodied perception (in the sense of aesthesis) of objects and practices maintaining black life. Taylor thus assembles something difficult, a black aesthetics that both tries to capture that “there is a single thing” worth calling black aesthetics (the black in black aesthetics) while at the same time recognizing the heterogeneity, expansiveness, and multiplicity of life-worlds of people racialized as black. He clearly and systematically fleshes out the nature, scope, limits as well as possible contributions of this difficult task in the first chapter of this much needed contribution to the philosophical discourse on aesthetics.In chapter 2, Taylor commences the difficult labor of engaging the race-aesthetics nexus by elaborating on the different types of invisibility that black bodies and selves are subjected to by the whitely eye. Taylor constructs a theoretical layering of racial disregard, a taxonomy of black invisibility informed by narratives of lived experience by some of the greats of black expressive culture and theory such as Ellison, Du Bois, Fanon, Morrison, and Wallace. While I would have appreciated the inclusion of Audre Lorde, another great of black expressive culture given her disclosure of the queer black female body, Taylor nevertheless effectively classifies key moments of the racialization of visuality in its practices of making-invisible black bodies. Given the work of John Tagg on the connection between visuality and power and the work of Nicholas Mirazoeff on the relevance of visuality as the producer of the real, we are well aware of the impact of the eye (in particular the whitely eye) in conjunction with different visual technologies in the operations of oppression. His elucidation of the different types of black invisibility (presence, personhood, perspective, plurality) constitutes a careful dissection of the different types of black invisibility that will certainly allow for future nuanced critical engagement with specific art objects or cases, as he skillfully does with his example of the casting of Zoe Zaldaña as Nina Simone. As Taylor states, “Modern visual experience is constituted in part by the possibilities for seeing, and for not seeing, the members of the different races. Race thinking is an integral part of modernity's screen of signs, and discovering what this screen screens out is the key to understanding black invisibility (48).” Indeed, what the screen screens out are black bodies in their bodily, material presence, in their status as human, in their multiplicity, complexity, and heterogeneity, the whitely eye thus effectively enacting an ocular regime of violence, a regime that has only gotten more brutal in the recent political climate—hence the importance of Taylor's taxonomy of black invisibility.It is no surprise that regimes of violence connected to visuality and other sensory domains have created a reality for black lives in which the link between aesthetics and politics is “unusually central to the practice of black politics (85).” Taylor consequently devotes chapter three to an unavoidable feature of the race-aesthetic nexus, what he calls the “problem of aesthetic autonomy,” one of its most important questions being whether expressive culture can transcend and oppose the milieu from which it emerges (80). In this discussion, Taylor is mindful of the variety of black cultural expression, the ideological diversity of black political thought, as well as the specific modes that black aesthetics yields in the political milieu. These modes—political aesthetics (advancement of political projects), aesthetic politics (aesthetics that serve as inspiring metaphors), and aesthetics as a politicized enterprise (continual political contestation) are, according to Taylor, exemplified in Marcus Garvey's political endeavors. Yet, the centerpiece of the chapter is Taylor's enlightening reconstruction of W. E. B. DuBois's understanding of the link between ethics and politics, particularly in the influential essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” By way a reading of Du Bois, not as a romantic or Platonist, but as an expressivist committed to an understanding of selves as immersed and shaped by their social, historical, cultural, and economic milieus, and whose art production is inextricably linked to ethics and truth in so far as these latter are bound to an existing set of social values and epistemic claims, Taylor is able to explain the Duboisian grand statement that “the Apostle of Beauty thus becomes the apostle of Truth and Right” (quoted in Taylor 91), thus explaining “Du Bois's argument for the unity of value” (91), and skillfully accounting for both the universalist thirst and contextualist desire found in Du Bois's grand claim that “all” works of art “propaganda.”In yet another relevant discussion of another moment of what so far have been “problem-spaces” associated with assemblies of black aesthetics (4), in chapter four Taylor examines “sarkaesthetics,” his name for representational somatic aesthetics as seen from the outside, and concentrates in “the beauty-gender nexus,” leading to a poignant discussion about the “straight hair rule” (113) and a piercing analysis of the progressive narrative of aesthetic inclusion that boasts a narrowing of the beauty gap that allows for the recognition of the beauty of blackness. Again, Taylor engages his clear, precise, analytic tools and cuts through the claims of this narrative, revealing its inaccuracy and the nefarious link between the abhorrence of black bodies and the fascination and desire for them, a point he shows through a compelling analysis inspired by Christina Sharpe's notion of “monstrous intimacy”as applied to Thomas Jefferson's relationship to Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom he had a sexual relationship. Moreover, I had to scream in agreement in his subsequent analysis of the perversity of current integrationist multiculturalism, that, as he rightly notes, allows for the inclusion of the occasional black body but that, in reality, is suffused with exclusion, is better understood as “eating the other” (bell hooks) and amounts to a “mode of interracial consumption that blocks the recognition of moral personhood (124) and “an intensification of mechanisms of racial violence and dehumanization” (129). Taylor's analysis is a sobering reminder that despite the many years that have passed between the ocular dissection of black bodies such as Sarah Baartman's, the simultaneously abhorred and desired Black Venus, we are still too close to that moment of violence enveloped by desire, what we may call the horror-desire nexus.In chapter 4 Taylor discusses, what, following Paul Gilroy, he calls “roots and routes” and engages the key question of authenticity, what Taylor considers one of the central problem spaces in black aesthetics. Guided by Taylor's careful and masterful analysis of the different levels of authenticity—from “authenticity” simply meaning “real,” to a “matter of properly relating oneself to an historical tradition” (145), to it disclosing a Heideggerian “Eigentlichkeit” or “properness” that embraces contingency, context, responsibility, and refuses moralism in order to make a project one's own) (147)—I wonder how Taylor himself is making the project of black aesthetics his own. That is, in what sense does the ownness of his project relate to the question of the possibility of there being “a single thing” that is black aesthetics. My question is concerned with the notion of assembly that is at work here that denies unity and accepts all the “contradictory dispertion” of the elements assembled. I thus wonder to what extent this particular notion of assembly is akin to the Deleuzian notion of assemblages such that we are led to question the possibility and nature of this “single thing.”When thinking through Taylor's project in light of the notion of authenticity that he preserves despite various critiques of the notion, most notably by Adorno, I begin to wonder about the relationship between authenticity and the very project that Taylor is engaged in—not in the sense of whether he Paul Taylor is being authentic in providing a black aesthetics but in the sense of whether the claim regarding the black in black aesthetics is made narrow despite its acknowledgement of multiple practices of black cultural expression. This question about the relationship between the notion of authenticity in connection with the assembly of black aesthetics that he proposes is, I believe, a consequence of the difficult sophisticated philosophical work that Taylor enacts in his significant analysis that courageously tries to capture a certain generality, even “oneness” of black aesthetics while conceding the multiplicity and contextualist, socially discursive as well as materially and historically rooted experience of black life and black expressive culture. Yet, the tension between the oneness implied in a generality and particular “assemblage” remains at odds to the appeal to the authentic, even when the authentic is conceived in the Heideggerian sense as “properness.” Questions arise as to which ocular or other practices serve to push this tension to one side or the other, to a more reified sense of the black in black aesthetics or to a more dispersed sense of it to the point where it is at risk of dissipating.My point here is not to suggest the impossibility of capturing a black aesthetics, even in the sense of assembly, given the multiplicity of black cultural production. It is to remind us of this tension and of looking at its productive moments so as to provide more nuanced, complex analyses of black artistic expression and black aesthetics. I find Taylor's project necessary as it presents analyses of different “problem-spaces” of black aesthetics with deep philosophical seriousness and presents a philosophically worthy and serious subject that has not been treated with enough attention and respect within philosophical aesthetics. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of Taylor's project is precisely a disclosure of blackness that needs to be considered in aesthetics in general and in black aesthetic production in particular, in order not only to honor such production but also to engage in critical, theoretical analyses of concepts that arise in such an enterprise—rather than relegating blackness or brownness as the “other” of the aesthetic, the “other” not so civilized, the “other” not so sophisticated, not so beautiful but so full of life and rhythm and connected to primal life (chapter six)!Given the notion of assembly theorized by Taylor, there will future analyses of other forms of black invisibility worth our theoretical efforts, for example the invisibility perpetuated by practices of the whitely eye in bodies of color. Where do these practices fit when there is no hegemonic whitely eye or spectator? These cases might not be simply about the reification of black tropes and stereotypes by people of color (blacks affirming the politics of respectability prescribed by whites) but the erasure of ways of being black or brown through specific practices enacted by people of color (the educated Latina that makes invisible the working-class Latinas or the black race scholar who is more than happy to quote his fellow male black scholars but is not attuned to black women's lives or their intellectual production). Where do these cases of what we might call black/brown intersectional invisibility register in the theoretical framework offered in Black is Beautiful as these do not involve the denial of presence/personhood but they do sometimes enact specific erasures of perspectives and pluralities, thus engaging in epistemic erasure and injustice? These concerns regarding practices of erasure and invisibility perpetuated by bodies of color are connected to the possibility of loving perception (Marilyn Frye, Maria Lugones), which Paul notes, but a loving perception not just from the eye, the ear, the touch, etc. of white bodies but also of bodies of color. As the great Toni Morrison has taught us, art can lead to knowledge and wisdom and thus alleviate the bruising and bleeding of the world, and, if not of the world, of specific bodies of color who continue to be made invisible in plain light by the ever arrogant white and whitely senses. With Paul C. Taylor's Black is Beautiful, an assembly itself disclosing the theoretically and philosophically rich and generative possibilities of the race-aesthetic nexus, philosophical aesthetics can perhaps learn to perceive black expressive culture and to do so, if not lovingly, at least with less arrogance and with the complexity, theoretical sophistication, and depth that Taylor so carefully enacts in the pages of his indispensable book.