scholarly journals Black Aesthetic/s as divine lover of No End In Sight

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esperanza Spalding

This artistic response centers Black aesthetical alchemy as a source of radical healing and liberation. Recognizing the brutal strain of a white supremacist caste system, the author situates resilience as a r/evolutionary spiritual trait and innate cultural praxis. Black life and wholeness is explored through intimate acts of place-making, reclamation, and creation.

2020 ◽  
pp. 147447402093153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas L Allen ◽  
Tyler McCreary

Black thought has long emphasized the vital importance of aesthetic politics to Black activism and community life. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of analyzing the aesthetic geographies of festivals. In this paper, we extend the discussion of festival geographies through theoretical engagement with Black thought and empirical engagement with Black parades in the US South. Specifically, we use an examination of the aesthetic geographies of Florida A&M University’s Marching 100 to think through the relationships between form and improvisation, performance and belonging and affirmative aesthetic politics. Following Black scholars, we show that Black aesthetic geographies work to counter the normative containment and erasure of Black spatiality in a white supremacist society. We demonstrate that Black aesthetic practices act as a refusal of this containment and erasure, disrupting normative geographies of whiteness and asserting Black socio-spatial presence and relations of belonging that affirm Black life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-56
Author(s):  
Elyna Amir Sharji ◽  
Lim Yan Peng ◽  
Peter Charles Woods ◽  
Vimala Perumal ◽  
Rose Linda Zainal Abidin

The challenge of transforming an empty space into a gallery setting takes on the concept of place making. A place can be seen as space that has meaning when the setting considers space, surroundings, contents, the people and its activities. This research concentrates on investigating how visitors perceive the space by gauging their sense of place (sense of belonging towards a place). Galleries are currently facing changes in this technological era whereby multiple content and context, space and form, display modes, tools and devices are introduced in one single space. An observational study was done during the Foundation Studies Annual Exhibition held at Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University. The exhibition was curated and managed by staff and students of Foundation Year showcasing an array of design works. Analogue and digital presentations of paintings, drawings, sculptures, photography and video works were displayed.. The outcome of this research will contribute towards a better design criteria of place making which affects individual behaviour, social values and attitudes. Characterizing types of visitor experience will improve the understanding of a better design criteria of place making, acceptance, understanding and satisfaction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramkumar Unnipillai Santhakumari

A partial decipherment of Indus script is described. Sound values for Indus characters , readings obtained and conclusions derived are explained here. The Indus script seems derived from Protocuneiform script and in turn Brahmi script seems derived from the Indus script. The decipherment seems to indicate that the seals were a form of identification. There is evidence of an early form of caste system prevalent among Dalits in Southern India in these seals. The readings show that the language used was of Dravidian origin


Author(s):  
Michael Germana

Chapter 2 examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a text that ekphrastically simulates a moving or “peristrephic” panorama in general, and an antebellum antislavery panorama in particular. In the process, this chapter reads Ellison’s debut novel as a text indebted to and allusive of, while ironically commenting on, the life and career of celebrated fugitive and peristrephic panoramist Henry Box Brown, who shipped himself in a sealed wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia and thus from slavery to freedom in 1849. Brown’s subsequent efforts to navigate the terrain of abolitionist discourse within a white supremacist culture led him to create a moving panorama called the Mirror of Slavery, which chronicled the cruelties of slavery, yet ended with the promise of universal emancipation. In appropriating the visual grammar of the antislavery panorama, Ellison also extends its ambivalent temporal logic to create his own alternative history in service of the future.


Author(s):  
Rebecca LeMoine

From student protests over the teaching of canonical texts such as Plato’s Republic to the use of images of classical Greek statues in white supremacist propaganda, the world of the ancient Greeks is deeply implicated in a heated contemporary debate about identity and diversity. Plato’s Caves defends the bold thesis that Plato was a friend of cultural diversity, contrary to many contemporary perceptions. It shows that, across Plato’s dialogues, foreigners play a role similar to that of Socrates: liberating citizens from intellectual bondage. Through close readings of four Platonic dialogues—Republic, Menexenus, Laws, and Phaedrus—the author recovers Plato’s unique insight into the promise, and risk, of cross-cultural engagement. Like the Socratic “gadfly” who stings the “horse” of Athens into wakefulness, foreigners can provoke citizens to self-reflection by exposing contradictions and confronting them with alternative ways of life. The painfulness of this experience explains why encounters with foreigners often give rise to tension and conflict. Yet it also reveals why cultural diversity is an essential good. Simply put, exposure to cultural diversity helps one develop the intellectual humility one needs to be a good citizen and global neighbor. By illuminating Plato’s epistemological argument for cultural diversity, Plato’s Caves challenges readers to examine themselves and to reinvigorate their love of learning.


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