Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism explores the long-overlooked links between black nationalist activism and the renaissance of artistic experimentation emerging from recent African American literature, visual art, and film. GerShun Avilez charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As Avilez shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with black nationalist discourses. Avilez's close readings study how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods.

A bold addition to an advancing field, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism rewrites recent black cultural production even as it uncovers unexpected ways of locating black radicalism.

| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Art of Revolution Part I. The Question of "Closing Ranks" 1. The Claim of Innocence: Deconstructing the Machinery of Whiteness 2. The Suspicion of Kinship: Critiquing the Construct of Black Unity Part II. The Bodily Logic of "Revolutionizing the Mind" 3. The Demands on Reproduction: Worrying the Limits of Gender Identity 4. The Space of Sex: Reconfiguring the Coordinates of Subjectivity Conclusion: Queering Representation Notes Index | William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2017 — Modern Language Association (MLA)
|GerShun Avilez is an assistant professor of English at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.