Aesthetics & Theory across Africa & Afro-Diaspora

"From at least the late nineteenth century, African and Afro-diasporic intellectuals pursued a double strategy of writing and publishing in specific disciplines while also creating aesthetic works."

Reflection

Binyavanga harmed people. Some of them I knew, most I didn’t.

after Rona

We do not know when or if Rona will leave or take us with it.

& Other Pleasures

Although we seek escape, our goal cannot be to remain fugitives.

Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals*

ritual encounters—of movement building, of academic speculation—move through this work, and we are invited to witness and participate

Familiar Ground

Race and ethnicity buttress each other. Both are fictions with real effects, tied to how we experience ourselves as human.

UNK Male

I want something impossible from Pose: a show crafted from impossible fractures and unbearable traumas, a show we—I—might not survive.

Reviewer 2

Reviewer 2 is fantasy and fact, the inescapable nightmare and the banal experience.

screaming as method

How many centuries of terror populate the singing woman’s sorrow song?

Variations (for Deborah E. McDowell)

mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Black people’s songs have carried the fire and struggle of their lives since they first opened their mouths in this part of the world. They have always wanted a better day. –Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same” Deborah E. McDowell’s “New …