Aesthetics and Race

The culturally pervasive tendency to identify aspects of the body as aesthetically imperfect harms individuals and scaffolds injustice related to disability, race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and fatness. But abandoning the notion of imperfection may not respect people’s reasonable understandings of their own bodies. I examine the prospects for a practice of aesthetic assessment grounded in a notion of the body’s function. I argue that functional aesthetic assessment, to be respectful, requires understanding the body’s functions as complex, malleable, and determined by (...) the projects and interests of the person whose body it is. Aesthetically relevant functions, on this account, are determined neither by the body’s status as organism nor by cultural assumptions about how bodies should function or be used. (shrink)

As aesthetic beings, we are receptive to and engaged with the sensuous phenomena of life while also knowing that we are targets of others’ awareness: we are both aesthetic agents and aesthetic objects. Our psychological health, our standing within our communities, and our overall wellbeing can be profoundly affected by our aesthetic surroundings and by whether and how we receive aesthetic recognition from others. Being aware of and responsive to how others aesthetically experience us shapes our sense of self and (...) our ability to function in a world with others who are also both agents and objects. When our embodied selves and our cultural products are valued, and when we have rich opportunities for aesthetic experience and for the exercise of aesthetic agency, the aesthetic can foster and sustain wellbeing and help to make our lives worthwhile. But when we are subjected to aesthetic blight, restriction of our aesthetic agency, and aesthetic devaluing of our embodied selves and our communities’ cultural products, the aesthetic can do great harm. This essay explores the notions of aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents, their relations with each other, and the unique affordances of persons’ status as simultaneously aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents. It examines the prospects for bodily aesthetic experience to promote wellbeing and, at the end, considers how the aesthetic might play a role in establishing forms of mutual vulnerability and recognition to combat oppressive social hierarchies. (shrink)

Literary racial impersonation occurs when a narrative work fails to express the perspective of a minority ethnic or racial group. Interestingly, even when these works express moral themes congenial to promoting empathetic responses towards these groups, they can be met with public outrage if the group’s perspective is portrayed inaccurately. My goal in this paper is to vindicate the intuition that failure to express the perspective of a minority group well renders the work defective, both aesthetically and morally. I argue (...) that available frameworks exploring the connections between aesthetic and moral realms of value are inadequate to analyzing this phenomenon and propose a novel connection between aesthetic and moral values. Specifically, I demonstrate that the primary defect of literary racial impersonation is aesthetic and contingently constitutes a moral defect in our current social context. (shrink)

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also (...) shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

In this response, I suggest that Black southern women in the U.S. have always been central to the “reconstruction” that Taylor identifies as a central theme of Black aesthetics. Building on his allusions to Alice Walker and Jean Toomer, I explore Walker’s tearful response (in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) to Toomer’s Cane (2011). Walker identifies their mothers’ and grandmothers’ informal arts of storytelling and gardening as the hidden roots of both her and Toomer’s work. I (...) suggest that Walker’s tears function to water her mother’s (and othermothers’) gardens, thereby sustaining southern Black women’s foundational work in reconstruction. Through telling their stories and planting gardens, along with crafting meals, designing clothes, and designing and decorating homes, southern Black women have always been necessary to Black aesthetics—filling worlds with aesthetically-rich and energetic artworks that Black formal artists such as Walker channel and transfigure into their formal artistic productions. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the conception of an endogenous aesthetic matrix in the Caribbean and the Americas within a decolonial perspective.

Here I will put forward a claim about rhythm – that rhythm is relation. To develop this I will explore the entanglement of and antagonism between two notions of the musical avant-garde and its theorization. The first of these is derived from the European classical tradition, the second concerns Afrodiasporic musical practices. This essay comes in two parts. The first will consider some music-theoretical and philosophical ideas about rhythm in the post-classical avant-garde. Here I will explore how these ideas have (...) been used to, on one hand, stage a critique of Afrodiasporic musics, and specifically jazz, and, on the other hand, diminish and obscure the relation between the post-classical and Afrodiasporic avant-gardes. In the second part I will develop another lineage of rhythm, orthogonal to that of the post-classical avant-garde. Drawing from philosophy and Afrocentric, Afromodernist and, finally, Afrofuturist theory, I will map a theoretical move from rhythm understood, in its post-classical guise, as an exclusive and strictly musical category, to rhythm understood as an inclusive and plural category. This likewise charts a passage from an aesthetically autonomous understanding of objects of art to social and collective forms of artistic practice. (shrink)

In this article I discuss what I am calling “ally aesthetics.” I suggest a set of necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, considerations for the creation of successful instances of ally art. Focusing on three case studies, I propose some key characteristics of ally aesthetics, such as its contextual/temporal nature and how that relates to success and the importance of understanding the place of the ally aesthetic within the larger movements they are allying with.

£ British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] unique and sprawling collection of sixteen essays explores a wide range of perspectives on the human body and how it is embodied, lived, viewed, perceived, and constructed by ourselves and by others in both positive and harmful ways. The book’s contributors include philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and artists, as well as scholars who focus on (...) law, culture, and on Africana, race, gender, sexuality, and disability studies. In addition, the authors represent a diverse group of scholars whose personal and societal experiences are also part of the discussion. Centred in philosophical aesthetics, this book moves into and explores fields of everyday and somatic experience, evolutionary psychology, art, ethics, personal identity, and socio-political status and treatment. It shows how bodies are... (shrink)

Here I want to examine two different ways of viewing/reading Black Panther. I will call the first reading the Standard Morality Reading (SMR). I will call the second reading the Liberation Morality Reading (LMR). I argue that these two readings, and the forms of morality that influence them, are in tension with each other throughout the movie. They also produce a tension or moral struggle in King T’Challa and the citizens of Wakanda in general.

For Steve Biko, ‘Black Consciousness’ has to do with remedying the ‘lack’ and ‘failure’ which emanate from the colonial encounter. It describes the existential and ontological shift whereby the black moves towards the assumption of her humanity. Beginning on the margins of Continental European philosophy with Jacques Derrida and Frantz Fanon, I examine the pathogenesis of the situation of the black, and point to a road to recovery. In the process, I centre the lived experience of black folk: our yearning (...) to dance with the past; our need for air; our struggle to keep madness at bay. (shrink)

These two books challenge museums--the predominant and continually evolving institutions of art delivery--in order to uncover and expose the rampant political biases and hidden strategies that their founders, administrators, and boards of trustees have utilized in order to maintain the preferred status quo of predominantly white male power.

The body is a rich object for aesthetic inquiry. We aesthetically assess both our own bodies and those of others, and our felt bodily experiences have aesthetic qualities. The body features centrally in aesthetic experiences of visual art, theatre, dance and sports. It is also deeply intertwined with one's identity and sense of self. Artistic and media representations shape how we see and engage with bodies, with consequences both personal and political. This volume contains sixteen original essays by contributors in (...) philosophy, sociology, dance, disability theory, critical race studies, feminist theory, medicine, and law. They explore bodily beauty, sexual attractiveness, the role of images in power relations, the distinct aesthetics of disabled bodies, the construction of national identity, the creation of compassion through bodily presence, the role of bodily style in moral comportment, and the somatic aesthetics of racialized police violence. -/- Contents: Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, "Black Silhouettes on White Walls: Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern"; A. W. Eaton, "Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression"; C. Winter Han, "From 'Little Brown Brothers' to 'Queer Asian Wives': Constructing the Asian Male Body"; Deborah L. Rhode, "Appearance as a Feminist Issue"; Shirley Anne Tate, "A Tale of Two Olympians—Beauty, 'Race,' Nation"; Glenn Parsons, "The Merrickites"; Stephen Davies, "And Everything Nice"; Tobin Siebers, "In/Visible: Disability on the Stage"; Jill Sigman, "Live, Body-Based Performance: An Account from the Field"; Barbara Gail Montero, "Aesthetic Effortlessness"; Peg Brand Weiser and Edward B. Weiser, "Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite Women's Sports"; Yuriko Saito, "Body Aesthetics and the Cultivation of Moral Virtues"; George Yancy, "White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Un-Suturing"; Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating"; Ann J. Cahill, "Sexual Desire, Inequality, and the Possibility of Transformation"; Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin, "Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects: A Feminist Reclamation of Sexiness" -/- . (shrink)

This essay is about the history of challenges that women in elite sports have faced with respect to their gender identity within a society that perpetuates misleading aesthetic norms of beauty; it is a history fraught with controversy and injustice. . . . We recommend both the acknowledgment within the realm of elite sport of perceptual sexism based on misleading aesthetic norms of beauty, and a way of correcting such erroneous categorization that allows athletes the autonomy and agency to choose (...) to compete as male or female based on a declaration of their own gender identity. (shrink)

La identidad, el cuerpo y los imaginarios, en su vínculo con el arte y la cultura, son los conceptos básicos presentes en este libro. La asociación entre ellos no es nada casual. Responde a importantes necesidades epistemológicas y prácticas en la comprensión de lo que somos, de la medida en que el arte y la cultura nos constituyen y del modo en que lo corporal y lo imaginario se convierten en depositarios de los atributos que nos identifican. Esta sexta entrega (...) de La Fuente nace como iniciativa para el trabajo conjunto del Cuerpo Académico “Estética y Arte” de la BUAP y extiende su concepción y realización a otros cuerpos, asociados, junto al primero, en la Red de Investigaciones en Arte (RIA). Participan en el libro, de esta forma, investigadores de las universidades Autónoma de Puebla, Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Autónoma de Querétaro y de Barcelona. Se compone de tres secciones, precedidas cada una de ellas por Mesas Redondas dedicadas, respectivamente, al vínculo entre identidad y universalidad, a la estética del cuerpo femenino y a los imaginarios como depositarios de las identidades promovidas por el arte. Las secciones se completan con trabajos en torno a los mismos temas, realizados por integrantes de diferentes cuerpos académicos de la RIA o que colaboran con ella. (shrink)

Those who know anything about black history and culture probably know that aesthetics has long been a central concern for black thinkers and activists. The Harlem Renaissance, the Negritude movement, the Black Arts Movement, and the discipline of Black British cultural studies all attest to the intimate connection between black politics and questions of style, beauty, expression, and art. And the participants in these and other movements have made art and offered analyses that wrestle with clearly philosophical issues. In _A (...) Philosophy of Black Aesthetics_, I propose to identify and explore the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life. The book will consist of eight short chapters, each of which will discuss a complex of related themes and phenomena. Every chapter will begin with one or two illustrative real-world examples, and then use the complexities of these opening cases to introduce the relevant issues. Many people in several fields have explored various bits of the terrain that I’ll cover. But none has surveyed the entire terrain in the name of aesthetics, and none has conducted this survey from an explicitly philosophical perspective. Setting up the project in this way means that its main conclusions will come in two forms. One kind of conclusion will emerge from the way I frame the issues. The two most important points here are that the field of aesthetics ought to cover more than the study of western fine art, and that the field of black aesthetics allows and requires the sort of comprehensive and philosophical analysis that I’ll offer. Another set of conclusions will emerge from my treatment of the specific issues in each chapter. In each case the aim will be to defend, albeit briefly, some position on the major issues raised in each chapter. (shrink)

The body is relevant for aesthetics from two perspectives. We experience and assess bodies aesthetically from the outside; and we have aesthetic experiences of and through our bodies from the inside. In experiences of one’s own body, these perspectives often intersect in interesting ways. From both perspectives, the body is a site where aesthetic and ethical considerations are deeply intertwined. This article includes discussion of Beauty and the Body, Aesthetic Body Practices, Body Aesthetics and Gender Construction, Somatic Dimensions of Aesthetic (...) Experience, and The Body in Contemporary Art. (shrink)

This collection fills a gap in the current literature in philosophy and film by focusing on the question: How would thinking in philosophy and film be transformed if race were formally incorporated moved from its margins to the center? The collection’s contributors anchor their discussions of race through considerations of specific films and television series, which serve as illustrative examples from which the essays’ theorizations are drawn. Inclusive and current in its selection of films and genres, the collection incorporates dramas, (...) comedies, horror, and science fiction films into its discussions, as well as recent and popular titles of interest, such as _Twilight_, _Avatar_, _Machete_, _True Blood_, and _The Matrix _and _The Help_. The essays compel readers to think more deeply about the films they have seen and their experiences of these narratives. (shrink)

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the (...) body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. Foreward by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Authors include Noel Carroll, Gregory Velazco Y Trianosky, Monique Roelofs, Whitney Davis, Eleanor Heartney, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Phoebe M. Farris, Mary Devereaux, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Karina L. Cespedes-Cortes and Paul C. Taylor, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Stephen Davies, Jane Duran, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Keith Lehrer, Allen Douglas, Cynthia Freeland, Eva Kit Wah Man, Mary Bittner Wiseman, and Peg Brand's essay, "ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty.". (shrink)

Marguerite Clark as Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1918). Charlton Heston as Ramon Miguel Vargas in Touch of Evil (1958). Mizuo Peck as Sacagawea in Night at the Museum (2006). From the early days of cinema to its classic-era through to the contemporary Hollywood age, the history of cinema is replete with films in which the racial (or ethnic) background of a principal character does not match the background of the actor or actress portraying that character. I call this actor-character (...) race-mismatching. In this paper, I mainly explore whether a coherent and plausible account can be given of race-matching in terms of purely aesthetic considerations, i.e., an account that absent moral considerations can nevertheless coherently and productively answer the following questions: can race-mismatching itself ever be an aesthetic defect of a film, and if so, under what conditions can race-mismatching be such an aesthetic defect. I claim that once we have in place a precise account of the nature of race-matching, it becomes clear that films for which race-mismatching appears to constitute an aesthetic defect are actually films with which properly engaging requires audiences to satisfy inconsistent epistemic conditions. In such cases, I claim, race mismatching constitutes an aesthetic defect for the film-fiction because—in virtue of the inconsistency underwritten by the race-mismatching—that film-fiction undermines the very uptake it prescribes. I then argue that if what’s defective about race-mismatching aesthetically is predicated on something being defective about race-mismatching epistemically, then if there is nothing in principle defective about race-mismatching epistemically, then so too for mismatching aesthetically (and so too for mismatching morally). From this I conclude that reasons stemming only from race-matching/mismatching itself lack the normative force sufficient to warrant the claim that film-fictions ought not race-mismatch. (shrink)

This article introduces the preoccupations and themes that define the study and practice of black aesthetics. It presents a provisional sketch of a field that has long been recognized in other humanities disciplines, but that is only now gaining wide notice in academic philosophy. This sketch emphasizes the aspects of the field that invite specifically philosophic scrutiny, while touching lightly on specific artworks, critical literatures and historical developments. Among the topics that receive attention are the following: race, aesthetic politics, creolization, (...) nationalism, modernity, white supremacy and the blues. (shrink)

I am interested in looking at Krumpin’ through what I am calling the “politics of submergence.” If my world is chaotic, if my Blackness is my murderer, can I be expected to create beauty? Can my art be transformative? My paper argues that Krumpin’ is in fact transformative, not to the extent that it perpetuates hope, but maintains its social pessimism. In accepting both the conditions that have sustained the racial marginalization of African descended people, and the impotence of this (...) marginalized group to change the systemic social structures that continue racial subordination in the United States, Krumpin’ announces a reflective mode of racial identity and cultural existence that attends to the suffering of African-descended people in American ghettos. (shrink)

In the past two decades, African American filmmakers like Spike Lee have made significant contributions to the dialogue about race in the United States by adapting techniques from classic _film noir _to black American cinema. This book is the first to examine these artistic innovations in detail from a philosophical perspective informed by both cognitive film theory and critical race theory. Dan Flory explores the techniques and themes that are used in black _film noir _to orchestrate the audience’s emotions of (...) sympathy and empathy felt toward morally complex characters whom people might not typically find appealing in real life, such as thugs, drug dealers, or murderers. Using an approach that combines the cognitive insights of theorists like David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, and Murray Smith with the reflective Wittgensteinian methods for considering film employed by Stanley Cavell, Stephen Mulhall, and William Rothman, Flory shows how these films scrutinize the state of race in America, induce their viewers to do so as well, and illuminate the ways in which categories of race have defined and continue to direct much of our vision of the moral self and what counts as appropriate moral sensibility. (shrink)

all the violence in hip hop? Does po-po wield legit authority in the hood? Where does the real Kimberly Jones end and the persona Lil' Kim begin? Is hip-hop culture a "black" thang?

Beauty has captured human interest since before Plato, but how, why, and to whom does beauty matter in today's world? Whose standard of beauty motivates African Americans to straighten their hair? What inspires beauty queens to measure up as flawless objects for the male gaze? Why does a French performance artist use cosmetic surgery to remake her face into a composite of the master painters' version of beauty? How does beauty culture perceive the disabled body? Is the constant effort to (...) remain young and thin, often at considerable economic and emotional expense, ethically justifiable? Provocative essays by an international group of scholars discuss beauty in aesthetics, the arts, the tools of fashion, the materials of decoration, and the big business of beautification—beauty matters—to reveal the ways gender, race, and sexual orientation have informed the concept of beauty and driven us to become more beautiful. Here, Kant rubs shoulders with Calvin Klein. Beauty Matters draws from visual art, dance, cultural history, and literary and feminist theory to explore the values and politics of beauty. Various philosophical perspectives on ethics and aesthetics emerge from this penetrating book to determine and reveal that beauty is never disinterested. Foreward by Eleanor Heartney; Introduction by Peg Brand. Authors include Marcia M. Eaton, Noel Carroll, Paul C. Taylor, Arthur C. Danto, Kathleen M. Higgins, Susan Bordo, Dawn Perlmutter, Eva Kit Wah Man, Anita Silvers, Hilary Robinson, Kaori Chino, Sally Banes, and Peg Brand's essay "Bound to Beauty: An Interview with Orlan." (available here). (shrink)

A long and scholarly piece by Eva Kitt WahMan covers the history of Chinese conventionsgoverning female “beauty” from Confuciusthrough Maoism to the present day. Classicalmanuals provide highly specific requirements forcourtesans and concubines. The shrunken, pulpyappendages produced by foot-binding practiceswere regarded as the most sexually stimulatingfeatures of the female body. In 1949, following theinauguration of the Communist regime, womenwere expected to shun ornament and make-up, tohave short hair, wear party uniforms, and to lookas much like men as possible. The ideal for (...) thecontemporary Chinese woman is quite a lot likethe ideal for the courtesan of tradition, but the de-tails are drawn from western fashion magazines.Wah believes that such liberation, although it hasits advantages, is mainly nominal and fosters con-fusion. She writes: “Although Chinese womentoday are developing new self-confidence, they donot seem to be aware of the fact that one can be-come a slave of the fashion industry, which merelyrepeats the bodily constraints of past times in anew form” (p. 194). [review by Mary Mothersill, 2001 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2):211-214.]. (shrink)