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Document Type
Text
Broad Creation Date
2024
Language
English
Location
Portland
Abstract
This project argues that Black/ness embodies a uniqueness that is communicated through its poetic and aesthetic expression. This uniqueness is posited here as the Black Sublime. It addresses the conditionality of Black/ness in a state of constant historical and ongoing oppression this thesis calls Black State. This is the conditionality of DuBois’s Veil, or Glissant’s matrix, which screams for Opacity. Christina Sharpe aligns this historical context in her work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being with what she calls, “Wake Work”. The process of Wake Work moves through DuBois’s Veil, and Glissant’s aquatic reality, as a baptism, a violent submersion into nothingness that becomes a rebirth into thinglyness.
Exploring the realms of Black/ness as Black Sublime read with and against/despite the Kantian Sublime, is to understand more fully the connections between Black/ness and the possibilities of representation, this is to say, the As If. This As If, which is an abstraction, allows for the construction of race, which challenges Black/ness and its pursuit of Being, but is also a chaotic and poetic realm which ironically allows for possibilities outside of the fixed Black State of impossibility.
We will argue how its beingness or its ontology is disclosed through aesthetics and poetics, acting not only as a disruption to western standards of language and the binding narrative of Black/ness as contrary to the reasoning human, but also opens to something transformative and beyond it. This project explores the As Is of Black/ness and its relation to spirit, soul, abjection, and the sublime. We will show how the gesture of a Black Sublime allows vii for a generative liberational praxis that motivates and exists beyond the performativity of resistance and the metaphor of freedom. It is the possibility of the impossible.
Disciplines
Aesthetics | African American Studies | Arts and Humanities | Philosophy | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
Publisher
Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
City
Portland ME
Recommended Citation
Sholars, Novel Denise, "The Black Sublime and the Possibilities of the Impossible" (2024). Academic Research and Dissertations. 58.
https://digitalmaine.com/academic/58
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