Persistence, Art and Survival

A world of possibility spills from the relation between disability studies and Black Studies. In particular, there are lessons to be gleaned from the Black Arts Movement and Black aesthetic about conjuring the desirable from the undesirable. Artists of the Black Arts Movement beautifully modeled how to disrupt essentialized notions of race, where they found “new inspiration in their African ancestral heritage and imbued their work with their experience as blacks in America” (Hassan, 2011, p. 4). Of these artists, African-American photographer Roy DeCarava was engaged in a version of the Black aesthetic in the early 1960s, where his photography subverted the essentialized African-American subject. My paper explores DeCarava’s work in three ways, namely in how he, (a) approaches art as a site for encounter between the self and subjectivity, (b) engages with the Black aesthetic as survival and communication, and (c) subverts detrimental conceptions of race through embodied acts of listening and what I read as, ‘a persistent hereness.’ I interpret a persistent hereness in DeCarava’s commitment to presenting the unwavering presence of the non-essentialized African-American subject. The communities and moments he captures are here and persistently refuse, then, to disappear. Through my exploration of the Black Arts Movement in my engagement with DeCarava’s work, and specifically through his and Hughes’ (1967) book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, we are invited to reimagine disability-as-a-problem condition (Titchkosky, 2007) and deafness as an ‘excludable type’ (Hindhede, 2011) differently. In other words, this journey hopes to reveal what the Black Arts Movement and Black aesthetic, through DeCarava, can teach Deaf and disability studies about moving with art as communication, survival, and a persistent hereness, such that different stories might be unleashed from the stories we are already written into.

New Paradigms in William Grant Still’s Blue Steel

This chapter examines the aesthetics underlying William Grant Still's Blue Steel and contextualizes it as a Harlem Renaissance work engaged with the African past and Still's diasporic present. Composed in 1934, Blue Steel was envisioned by Still as an African American opera—one that not only treated an African American subject, but was also rooted in African American and African diasporic culture—namely, its syncretic religion, voodoo or voudon. The chapter first takes a look at Still's first exposure to and early attempts at opera before discussing his collaborators in the creation of Blue Steel. It then provides a summary of Blue Steel's plot and characters as well as its use of African music for conceptual approaches to representing Africa and Africanness through musical signifiers. It also examines how voodoo became a means for Still to express himself as a Harlem Renaissance artist by functioning as a multifaceted signifier of African identity within the New World.

Reconstituted Melancholy

This chapter takes a closer look at the underpinnings of the cultural melancholy that claims post-Emancipation African American subject-formations and cultures. It does so by putting psychoanalytic theorizations of Sigmund Freud's concept of melancholia and Jacques Derrida's poststructuralist reading of Karl Marx's work on specters in conversation with August Wilson's Piano Lesson. Wilson's play traces racial melancholy sustained and reconstituted as a result of, and in resistance to, an enduring struggle with racial oppression as American nationhood nestled firmly into the industrial era and normative homogenization and consensus steadily rose against the backdrop of staggering European immigration statistics. The chapter shows how the play stages parallel trajectories of psychological restriction sustained by post-Emancipation black men and women through ritual practice as they struggle for inclusion in a segregationist society that has historically subjugated them. It extends theories of race and ethnicity by positing a reading of the racialized subject that shows how she/he is at once constituted through and distinct from the racial collective and its history of racialization.