A post by Nicholas Whittaker

There is something important in the oxymoronism implicit in the phrase “the black avant-garde.” A well-meaning reader (or one clutching tightly to their purported “antiracism”) will chafe at the suggestion that “blackness” and “avant-garde” become paradoxical when conjoined. The easiest way to resist it is to generate examples. Take, say, Julius Eastman, or Adrian Piper; M. Nourbese Phillip, Amiri Baraka; Alice Coltrane, Bill Gunn; Ben Patterson, Nathaniel Mackey; Cecil Taylor, Julie Dash. Such luminaries seem to uncontroversially occupy the place in art history generally reserved for the likes of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, David Lynch and Gertrude Stein. If the black avant-garde is an incoherent concept, why can we list so many examples with such ease?

Most conceptions of “the avant-garde” identify those works of art that step outside of the governing norms of a given way of doing art and produce new norms, reconnaissancing new possibilities for that art practice. The avant-garde is, in other words, defined by a radical imagination: the capacity to imagine hitherto unknown or unacknowledged forms of art. And each of the black artists I listed above seems to have done precisely this, in a myriad of glorious ways.

And yet, when asked to list an avant-garde artist, I suspect that my reader would have listed a member of my second cluster listed above, rather than my first. Why do I feel such suspicion? On the one hand, I may still be reeling from the aftershocks of the “canon wars” that have erupted intermittently in universities and art circles for the past few decades. It is inarguable that Eastman is nowhere near as well-known and well-regarded as Cage, Piper as Duchamp, Gunn as Lynch, Baraka as Stein. This is a crisis of what the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “exclusion”: the absence of black exemplars of a given category from accounts of that category, the erasure of black presence. If this accurately describes my suspicions, then the oxymoronicism of “the black avant-garde” is just the false and misguided sense that these two signifiers, when placed together, generate an empty set.

On the other hand, something more systematic may be afoot. In his landmark In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Fred Moten evokes such systematicity: “What I’ve been specifically interested in here is how the idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically–as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other.” Observing the crisis of exclusion–that there exists a presumption that “the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American…as necessarily not black”–Moten suggests that this presumption may be a product of the fact that the avant-garde is taken to necessarily–rather than merely contingently–exclude blackness, and vice versa. The product of the conjunction of “black” and “avant-garde” is not an empty set, but a contradictory one.

Given the brief definition of “avant-garde” I gave above, how could this be true? What would “blackness” have to be, or be presumed to be, for it to seem to genuinely preclude the possibility of the avant-garde? I want to consider that the oxymoronicism of the “black avant-garde” may derive from the oxymoronicism of “the black imagination”. That is, the precarity of the black avant-garde may stem from the presumed black incapacity for imagination.

There are two (related) senses in which blackness and imagination could be (considered to be) incompatible. The first is relatively straightforward, but no less essential or insidious for it. This is the classically racist view that, in the words of Thomas Jefferson (1781), “in imagination [Negroes] are dull, tasteless, and anomalous,” that black people are incapable of imagination.

First, to the importance of this seemingly-antiquated view. In her dizzyingly-comprehensive study of the origin of the modern concept of race, Denise Ferriera da Silva (2007) argues that race was formed as the schematizing of different human bodies according to their capacity for “self-determination.” Silva negatively defines “self-determination” as the ability to escape “external determination,” to be able to have one’s rational capacities, existential projections, or ontological character be unaffected by the external world. If self-determination is the capacity to escape external determination, then it is the capacity to escape a kind of brute, animalistic experience of the world, in which one acts because of the way the world immediately presents itself to one. Imagination might be understood, in this context, as the capacity to escape the world as it presents itself and generate alternatives to it. Such alternatives could not originate from the world as it is; instead, their novelty must be the result of some capacity for generative creativity that is independent to the self-determining creature. Thus, self-determination would presume, or make possible, the capacity for imagination.

This makes the dedemocratization of imagination a central defining feature of racialization. Such a framing allows us to make sense of the following exemplary display of classical racism from Jefferson (1781):

“But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.”

Jefferson thinks blacks only possess those artistic capacities defined by repetition, by a simple 1:1 input/output relation to the external world: “plain narration” and an accuracy of “tune and time”. Imagination–the ability to genuinely compose, to generate non-mimetic, and thus original, artistic work–is apparently nowhere to be found in black art. This incapacity for imagination explains the apparent impossibility of the black-avant-garde, but more than that: it explains the impossibility of black art, and of black humanity.

Most of us would, of course, insistently condemn such a view. Its insidiousness lies in the fact that it survives such condemnation. I have previously written about the still-common perception of black artists as “truth-tellers”, creating art that mirrors reality. Such a clouded view makes it difficult to appreciate or attend to imaginative breaks within their work. (Elsewhere, I’ve used this framework to interrogate the presumption that Kendrick Lamar means every line he raps, or that he is uninterested or incapable of instilling distinctly literary complexities–breaks with reality–into his work). Thus, an ability to list members of black avant-garde canons does not prove that one experiences such artists in the same way one experiences white avant-garde artists, or indeed black and white artists, simplicter. (I’ll here note that I’ve not clarified how non-black, non-white racial formation plays into the story I’m sketching. That’s work for another day; suffice to say I don’t intend to collapse such racial formation into the black or the white terms I’m dealing with here.) The question is: do we, in our everyday, experience the black avant-garde, black art, black activity, as the product of imaginative capacity? Or do we continue to perceive black activity as in some sense rigidly, uniquely affectable?

Why might we continue to do so? I promised another way blackness and imagination could be considered oxymoronic. This second type of contradiction might be seen as the liberal afterlife of the first, a way its consequences survive the dismissal of its premises. It is illuminated by a parallel contradiction examined by Philip Brian Harper in his work Abstractionist Aesthetics: that between blackness and abstraction. That work “bemoan[s] the hegemony of realism within African American aesthetics,” rather than protesting the presumption of the incapacity of that tradition to generate anything but such realism (2015, 13).

Harper contends that this hegemony is the result of the apparent contradiction between blackness as a lived social reality and abstraction as a suspension of the markers of intelligible reality. “How can a work clearly enough ground itself in the real-world racial order as to register as black while at the same time clearly enough dissociating itself from lived reality as to register as productively abstractionist?” (2015, 9) That is, blackness, on this view, is not abstract; it is, definitionally, a real, material fact of life–it is factical, as the phenomenological tradition would have it. Antiracist, postcolonial, or multicultural challenges against philosophical, political, or artistic universality cache themselves out in precisely such a claim. As the argument goes, universalist descriptions like “humans,” “Americans,” “beauty,” etc., lose the particular details of black life–such as those that constitute the experience of antiblackness–that make it black. Harper reveals that aesthetic abstraction is similarly troubled by blackness. If abstraction, as an artistic practice, is the escape into pure formalism, or at least into a suspension of realist perception of the sort we use in our everyday lives, then blackness is lost in this bolt for freedom. Blackness–as a politically-charged visual marker, as a politically-charged set of histories, as a politically-charged concept–is precisely the sort of thing abstraction would reduce away. Thus, to render blackness abstract is to lose its blackness; to render abstraction black is to lose its abstraction.

The same can conceivably be said for blackness and imagination. If imagination is what Moten (2003) calls a kind of “antiworldliness” – a suspension of what is the case – and if the political force of blackness is irrevocably tied up in the fact that blackness is a real set of social and material conditions, then the act of imagination is a suspension of blackness. While this assertion of paradoxicality may sound overblown, consider again the doggedness with which modern art viewers experience black art as journalistic, possessing a 1:1 input/output with their material reality. The concern here is not that this reveals that we do not think that black artists can imagine; but that we do not think that imagination can be black.

In her essay “Flying,” philosopher-artist Adrian Piper details one of her most treasured recurrent dreams:

“So I take a deep breath, jump, flap my wings vigorously and catch a wind current! I’m still a bit dizzy because of the height, but I’m firmly sailing, soaring aloft, confidently navigating a dangerous and solitary journey, which I come to love and crave. I can do it. I’ve escaped.”

Such flights of fantasy inevitably, though, have their wings brutally clipped whenever antiblackness reasserts itself in Piper’s life as a reminder of her materiality, of reality. The assertion of her blackness “obstructs my self-transcendence, my ability to lose myself temporarily in the other, in the world, in my abstractions…the sobering facts press in on my daily life too insistently.”

Taking this arrested flight philosophically seriously means seeing how it presents black reality and imaginative flight as opposed, as requiring each other’s suspension or, to mirror Moten’s earlier words on the black avant-garde, depending on each other’s exclusion for their own coherence. This is a markedly antiracist way of understanding this conflict. But it is troubling that it perpetuates the same conclusions that the markedly racist approach bodied forth: that black art is forever precarious, that black activity is forever turned against itself; who could speak of a black avant-garde under such conditions? Ought we accept this? Or does such friction reveal a rot within our conceptions of blackness and imagination? Until such possibilities are fully excavated, Jefferson’s words will transfix us:

“Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches of poetry.–Among the blacks there is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.”

References

Ferreira da Silva, Denise (2007) Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Harper, Philip Brian (2015) Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture. NYU Press.

Jefferson, Thomas (1781) Notes on the State of Virginia. Available online: https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html

Moten, Fred (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press.