The latest trajectory of Black aesthetics has been characterized by the overlapping yet competing terms of the New Black Aesthetic (NBA), post-soul aesthetic, and post-Blackness. The designations describe art and literature that is informed by the Black aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement while also departing from them. Often being burdened with representing or speaking on behalf of their entire racial group, these writers and artists grapple with effects of racializations on politics, gender, sexuality, class, history, archive, and nationhood, issues which they may sidestep, complicate, or refuse in their work. These terms encompass practices of disidentification, ways of resolving the ethics and/or burden of representation, and alternative affective and aesthetic approaches to overt revolutionary politics. This seminar thus advances methods that treat the aesthetic and formal innovations of black writers seriously as to avoid the tendency of extracting solely sociological insights from Black and other minoritarian artists. 

While NBA and post-soul/black literature often describe writers circa 1990s onward, this seminar seeks to explore (1) how contemporary Black aesthetics speaks to past aesthetic and literary movements of Black diasporic literature and (2) how past literary movements (e.g. the Harlem Renaissance) anticipate current discourse of Black aesthetics. We invite papers that explore works of literature—of any genre and time period—that seek to advance or complicate recent aesthetic turns in Black literary study. In addition to expansiveness of  time and genre, we also invite papers that may challenge what Lorgia García-Peña called “hegemonic Blackness” within Black literature. Instead of prioritizing Anglophone or US Black literary tradition, this seminar invites transnational approaches to racialized aesthetics across Black diasporic English or translated texts. 

What are the conditions under which we can read historical Black diasporic literature under this contemporary turn-of-the-21st-century strand of competing Black aesthetics? How do historical approaches to aesthetics and literature inform our contemporary understanding of new/post Black aesthetics? What are the shifting ethics of representation across time and place? And how do writers complicate the ethics of representation through formal practices? 

While we are rooted in literature, we also invite interdisciplinary approaches to literature through visual culture and film. Topics may include but are not limited to: disidentification, burden of representation, ethics, refusal, archive, history, gender, sexuality, class, genre, form, narrative theory, visual culture, film, aesthetics. 

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Andrew Avalos ([email protected]) or Laine Barriaga ([email protected]).