RACISM TOWARDS AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY AS REFLECTED IN MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS: BLACK AESTHETIC CRITICISM

The study of the African American community always circulates among the issues of race, racism, discrimination, slavery, and oppression. All these issues become the grand themes of African American literature. These literary works could be studied and covered under the scope of Black Aesthetic criticism. One of the prominent works of African American literature is an autobiography of Maya Angelou entitled I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). This autobiography portrays Angelou’s childhood experiences which brings up the issues of race, racism, and oppression. This paper aims to analyze the kinds of racism experienced by the African American community and their struggle against it as depicted in the book. To provide a thorough discussion of the matter, critical race theory was employed as the method of analysis. The result is drawn based on the basic tenets of critical race theory proposed by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2001); everyday racism, interest convergence, the social construction of race, differential realization, intersectionality, and voice of Color. The findings show the struggle of African American community against racism which are expressed through the act of ignorance, promoting intelligence, communal efforts, resistance, promoting social movement, and stepping forward to voice their experience through African American literature.

How to See Like Hammons

“HAS ANYONE ELSE SEEN THESE.” Scribed on a wall in pencil, this fragment served as crude wall text for a vitrine in David Hammons's 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. The vitrine, filled with memorabilia, photocopies, and rare primary documents, was but one of many locations where Hammons displayed Hammons. To ask “Has anyone else seen these?” is to slyly pose a question that already has an answer: yes, or maybe, or no. Any answer to that question proves Hammons's point: that he himself is the subject who sees and the object to see. This methodological maneuver is part and parcel of Hammons's decades-long practice and serves to enact a Black aesthetic determination already sleeved in its own method. This article works to unpack how Hammons throws into methodological disarray the question of art's histories by his relentless invocation of Black aesthetic practices that deform, if not refuse, their own making.

Book Review: Black Aesthetic: Adorno, Arts, Emancipation

In his latest work entitled "Estetika Hitam: Adorno, Seni, Emansipasi", Goenawan Mohamad tries to dissect a problem in discussing works of art in Indonesia, which always discusses the meaning of art. Therefore, in his current work, Goenawan Mohamad discusses how a work of art can have a meaning, using the analysis of one of the thinkers from the Frankfurt School, namely Theodor Wiesengrand Adorno. It discusses how Adorno views the meaning of a work of art and why Adorno thinks about it by writing the background of Adorno's thought by telling his life story.

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

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.

The Social Science Music of Terri Lyne Carrington

This chapter explores the music, life, and institutional building of drummer, feminist, and artistic director for the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, Terri Lyne Carrington. Through and examination of her cultural work, this chapter discusses Carrington’s attack on patriarchy in jazz culture through Black feminist thought reflected in her musical practices. Her work exposes the irony of the Black aesthetic values of inclusion at the foundation of African American improvised music in contrast with the patriarchal practice of marginalizing women improvisers. Carrington’s musical arrangement of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s composition “Echo” on The Mosaic Project (2011) is analyzed as linked critique of anti-blackness over and several compositions on Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science (2019) are analyzed as an intersectional critique of police brutality, gay conversion therapy, celebration of Black feminism, and gender inequity represented respectively in “Bells (Ring Loudly),” “Pray the Gay Away,” “Anthem,” and “Purple Mountains.”

(Re)imagined Possibilities

This essay and accompanying conversation examine the works of filmmaker and scholar Zeinabu irene Davis, whose work centers Black women, engaging their histories and contemporary stories, and thus representing their agency and complex personhood. Davis acknowledges Third Cinema and African/Afro diasporic influences in shaping her style of storytelling and in evolving her fierce Black aesthetic that disrupts the normativity of the dominant white gaze in mainstream media. These choices signify Davis’s ethos and priorities as a filmmaker, a documentarian, a womanist, and a community organizer who humanizes and celebrates her characters on-screen.

Digressions: Sancho and Sterne

Artifice and authenticity are conflictingly related in the extroverted and stylised displays of feeling in the texts of Laurence Sterne and Ignatius Sancho. Whereas Sterne employs aesthetic playfulness to set himself apart from literary predecessors, Sancho uses it to claim a part in the culture of taste and sensibility. This chapter reads Sancho and Sterne’s literary adoption of a digressive tonality distinctly not as imitative but as entangled. The scenes dealing with slavery in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey are tied into more bawdy episodes. While not necessarily only sentimental, they still elude ideas of political solidarity. Sancho’s interjections of emotional concern in his published letters in turn not only highlight his capacity to feel (as well as his attachment to his family); in adopting the Sternian digressive dash, he does not adhere to the usual linear form of redemptive abolitionist writing and displays a uniquely Black aesthetic voice, albeit one that also reproduces deprecating sentimental tropes. This needs to be read as more than simply epigonic. Sancho’s digressive tone, it will be argued, intervenes more fundamentally into the sentimentalist romance with the cultured, feeling subject of modernity, while Sterne remains more elusive in his aestheticised divagations.

“Harlem Knows”: Eleo Pomare's Choreographic Theory of Vitality and Diaspora Citation in Blues for the Jungle

This article examines Eleo Pomare's concept of vitality in his piece Blues for the Jungle (1966) as a black aesthetic approach to choreography. Vitality seeks to connect with black audiences in Harlem by referencing and affirming shared cultural knowledge, conveying an embodied epistemology of the US political economy defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Using a lens of diaspora citation, I argue that Pomare's choreographic citations of “vital” ways of moving and knowing in Harlem critique the terms for “proper” national belonging, while articulating diasporic belonging in motion.