Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781478029212 Academic Inspection Copy

The Aesthetic Character of Blackness

Sounds Like Us
Description
Author
Biography
Table of
Contents
Google
Preview
In The Aesthetic Character of Blackness, Jemma DeCristo theorizes the means by which black art liberates the free world but does not and cannot liberate black people. Drawing on Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke and as well as the aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Theodor Adorno, DeCristo critiques the exaltation of black culture and art's saving power by analyzing the violence underneath aesthetic production. She tracks black music's representational and anti-representational capacities in projects of black non/humanization from nineteenth-century abolitionism and the founding of the recording industry to the emergence of black queer blues performers and the rise of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Theorizing the contemporary neoliberalization of black audio-visual spectacle, DeCristo ultimately demonstrates that the voluptuous world of black aesthetics beautifies an anti-black world that wields black art and culture as a weapon against black life.
Jemma DeCristo is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Preface. Black Art Against Black People ix Introduction 1 1. Emancipating the Spaces of Sonic Capture 31 2. More Nearly Members of the Family: The Ugly Hiss 67 3. Ma Rainey's Phonograph 103 4. Music Against the Subject 133 5. Sounds Like Us: On Beautification 167 Coda. Self-Defense Against Density 207 Acknowledgments 211 Notes 213 Bibliography 245 Index
Google Preview content