Clasping Together the Magical and the Menial

Abstract

Since decolonizing aesthetics should demand that we question historical templates that are treated uncritically as the vehicles for conveying authoritative knowledge, this experimental essay aims at the level of form to enact the content for which it is arguing. It suggests that interacting with the works of three African-American women artists involves viewers in a mode of creolizing or reenfranchising marginalized creative resources. Specifically, the relevant aesthetic objects facilitate relationships among spheres of life that have been attenuated or made distant from one another in worlds dominated by Euromodern hegemony and its models of scientific and technical rationality. These works cultivate the meeting of the once and still living by centring the continued dynamism of shared aspirations; they bridge an affirmation of dignified Black femininity and ladyhood with facing and fighting the gruesome attacks on projects of Black freedom; and they connect ancestral and contemporary artists similarly involved with making the everyday sublime through concretely interweaving the extraordinary with the quotidian. As they clasp together what have been severed domains, they offer their viewers a distinct context for becoming in ways that exemplify the larger quality of a decolonizing aesthetics focused on creating a world in which many worlds thrive.