Browsing by Subject "Opacity"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Black Western thought : toward a theory of the black citizen object
(2012-12) Reeves, Roger William; Jones, Meta DuEwa; Richardson, Matt, 1969-; Young, Dean; Wilks, Jennifer; Jones, Joni L
Black Western Thought: Toward a Theory of the Black Citizen-Object troubles and challenges the philosophical category of the human, particularly the black human. Oppositionally reading Enlightenment texts like Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Emanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime, I extend Emanuel Eze and Charles Mills critiques of Kant and the Enlightenment through relinquishing the quest for a black humanity. This project embraces the abjection of blackness and posits that in the rejection of quest for humanity the black citizen-object reveals heretofore unexplored ontology, epistemology, poetics, and philosophy. Through careful close-reading of poets Phillis Wheatley, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown, this project explores the political and aesthetic possibility of extending the democracy of subjectivity and presiding intelligence to black aesthetic and intellectual productions. Moving away from the notion of blackness as fear-inducing, funky, reprobate, and disorderly, this project constantly seeks to play with the dark rather than play in the dark. This act of ‘playing with the dark’ manifests as an interrogation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in relationship to quantum physics and visibility / invisibility of blackness. The project hopes to shake the very stable ground of the ontology of aesthetics and academic discourse.
Culture is autonomy, autonomy is revolution : Afro-Nicaraguan Creole women’s cultural politics of opacity
(2017-05-08) White, Melanie Yvette; Hooker, Juliet; Gordon, Edmund T.
This report explores the relationship between expressive culture and decolonial politics by taking up an analysis of contemporary Afro-Nicaraguan women’s diasporic cultural production. It shows how, in the face of political exclusion and national unbelonging within the context of the Nicaraguan nation, appeals to diaspora and the counter-nationalist threat they pose may aid in securing state-granted cultural, political, and material rights for Afro-Nicaraguans. Yet, if not, they may at the very least aid in establishing a fuller sense of autonomy from the state through a symbolic alliance with the Anglophone Caribbean. This contemporary forging of diaspora is made possible through cultural production as well as through what I term a cultural politics of opacity/interiority that figures heavily in Afro-Nicaraguan women’s art, and perhaps black women’s art more broadly. This report suggests that it is the obscurity of opacity that makes it a radical political mechanism for social transformation, and argues that despite the eternal navigation of contradictions and neoliberal markets, Afro-Nicaraguan women artists make space in their work for the centering of black women’s sexuality, pleasure, and erotic desires for a more autonomous and liberatory future. It is precisely the illegibility of culture as politics and of the interiority of black women’s erotic desires to the Nicaraguan state that enables the radical political potential of Afro-Nicaraguan women’s cultural production. This report brings together scholarship on the black radical imaginary, black feminist pleasure politics, and the political mobilization of Afro-Nicaraguan women to further think through what more liberatory and decolonial visions for the future might look like, as well as the strategies that might be used to get there. I argue that a politics of opacity rooted in the intersectional experiences of black women, as demonstrated in the context of Afro-Nicaraguan women, may not only privilege the erotic as an interior and perhaps less co-optable form than the pornographic promoted and sold within larger neoliberal markets, but may be the very place from which to think liberatory politics.
Reimagined family ties : redressing memory through photography in the work of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Aline Motta and Juliana dos Santos
(2022-08-12) Fernandez, Maria Emilia, M.A.; Nelson, Adele
This thesis investigates the work of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Aline Motta and Juliana dos Santos, three contemporary Brazilian artists who are proposing different ways of looking at the past while also addressing the interlocking forms of oppression at work in the present. Through their collaborations with relatives and ancestors, in which photography plays a crucial role, the artists reflect on the colonial trauma of over three centuries of genocide, slavery and colonization in Brazil. However, I argue that they go beyond that, proposing a way of reimagining frameworks of kinship as a form of redress. By articulating new lines of descent that constitute a (re)membering of those fragmented narratives that remain in the archives, I contend that the artists are addressing present structural, everyday racism while also performing and expanding the possibilities of inhabiting the future. In establishing a relation between their artistic practices, this thesis analyzes the ways they appeal to personal and collective memories brought to the foreground in family photographic records to conceive paths towards repairing, or at least naming, the wounds inflicted by the forms of class, gender and race violence that continue to plague the country. Moreover, this text reveals how their works invite a rearrangement of our perception of time and contribute to a critique of linear temporality, evincing the falseness of any narrative of the past as single, stable and flowing in only one direction. My research is guided by questions such as: How can photography serve as a medium of fabulation and of imagining family ties across time and space? If photographs help constitute a family’s affective archive, how can these intergenerational dialogues become a form of thinking about the future and inventing new lines of filiation? Furthermore, how can these gestures signal the way, if not toward healing, towards an ever-incomplete practice of redress?