In Search of Radicalism: Review of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1971--Wadsworth A. JarrellIn Search of Radicalism: Review of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism by GerShun Avilez by Sasha Panaram | @SashaPanaram | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The past several years has witnessed the publication of several books that address matters related to the Black Arts Movement. Amy Abugo Ongiri’s Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for the Black Aesthetic (2009) considers the formation of the Black aesthetic during the Black Power and Black Arts Movement using a methodology grounded in cinema studies and music theory.
SOS – Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (2014) compiled by John H. Bracey, Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst offers an impressive collection of fiction, drama, and poetry alongside critical essays that examine the place of aesthetics, gender, and popular culture in the Black Arts Movement.
Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford’s New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006) similarly amasses critical writings that draw out the links between a radical racial politics and issues concerning gender and sexuality showing how this period connects to other contemporaneous cultural movements.  
The ongoing interest in this charged period reflects a desire to continue to understand how the Black Arts Movement inspired enduring forms of artistic expression, intersected with other cultural movements, manifested in different institutions, and informed sexual and racial politics. Among the various scholars working in this field, one stands out among the many for his finely crafted argument, innovative research, and necessary intervention. GerShun Avilez’s new book, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (2016), reveals his commitment to unearthing the complexity of the Black Arts Movement and the full range of its implications today.
Radical Aesthetics illustrates that as integral as music was to the Black Arts Movement, so, too, were novels, plays, film, and painting. By broadening the set of texts that we associate with this period and analyzing across different genres, Avilez skillfully honors the integrity of each form he works with while also insisting that what enables these forms to exist in conversation with one another is their shared investment in artistic experimentation.
Timely and incisive, Radical Aesthetics charts the relationship between black nationalism and creative experimentation explaining how discourses concerning nationalism and revolution that surfaced during the Black Arts Movement are taken up, interrogated, and ultimately subverted in the work of Post-Civil Rights artists. Avilez teaches us to look for the ways that revolutionary nationalist discourse is a deeply political artistic strategy that lends itself to artistic experimentation.
Employing the phrase, Black Arts era, he repeatedly makes clear how the problems concerning nationalism that were prevalent to the Black Arts Movement have since then occupied artists and thinkers way into the twenty-first century influencing contemporary African American expression. In his own words, this book “is and is not about the Black Arts Movement” (167). Indeed this text masterfully does several things at once as it urges for a careful reconsideration of the theories that undergird the Black Arts Movement while instructively showing that these theories exceed themselves and the time period in which they were created when they are revised by artists today.
Organized in two parts, Radical Aesthetics examines the tenets that animate Modern Black Nationalism including its adherence to “closing the ranks” and “revolutionizing the mind” as well as the rhetoric surrounding White innocence, Black kinship, reproduction, and sex (17). Aware that these four areas existed prior to Modern Black Nationalism and that they frequently manifest in African American artistic culture, Avilez unpacks how each discursive site attends to political issues that mark the Black Arts era and provide the complex framework through which we can begin to think about nationalist rhetoric.
What makes Radical Aesthetics unique in its approach to Modern Black Nationalism and the aesthetic radicalism it advances is its deployment of Queer of Color Critique (QOCC), a term Roderick A. Ferguson uses in Aberrations in Black to signal the “interrogation of social formations as the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class… and how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices” (149).
Building on the work of Ferguson, E. Patrick Johnson, and Sharon Holland, among others, Avilez contributes to the burgeoning field of QOCC to exemplify how the most marginalized and dispossessed members of society can and do identify with and critique dominant ideologies. This observation suggests that to move through the world, as a queer person of color, is to constantly negotiate different identities as they relate to gender, sex, race, and class; to always be prepared to relinquish a part of one’s identity.
The beginning of Radical Aesthetics considers how the filmmaker, Marlon Riggs, and writer, Larry Neal, conceptualize their commitment to “revolution” and how that commitment necessarily involves disrupting traditional art strategies if not entirely upending what we have come to recognize as acceptable. The unusual pairing of Riggs and Neal – unusual given their work in different genres and historical contexts – points to what is both unexpected and productive in the work Avilez has produced: the way he generates a genealogy and a methodology that links artists from during and after the Black Arts Movement.
Radical Aesthetics is replete with pairings that make the reader pause and then consider again how artists innovatively respond to cultural production in light of nationalist discourse. Moreover these pairings suggest the importance of what Avilez calls disruptive inhabiting or a strategy rooted in reimagining whereby artists move outside binary models predicated on engaging or rejecting ideologies and instead participate in modes of critique that result in artistic experimentation (12). Disruptive inhabiting, then, is a form of assessment that lives inside the space of contradiction and is engaged by artists involved in another type of negotiation that assesses Modern Black Nationalism in the wake of new cultural production.
Chapter One, “The Claim of Innocence: Deconstructing the Machinery of Whiteness”, interrogates how artists engage Whiteness and the elements that inform this identity to question the frameworks that it generates. In the works of Ed Bullins, Adrian Piper, and Cornelius Eady, Avilez determines how White American identity engenders and promotes racism, and creates uneven hierarchies of power that perpetuate racial bias. These artists ongoing engagement with Whiteness – a Whiteness related to identity formation not necessarily heritage – exposes how this construct operates and acts on its surroundings to show how images and identity creation can approach revolution or be revolutionary (31). Each of these artists deconstructs Whiteness and White innocence, in particular, to build a more robust understanding of Black nationalist thought.
At stake in this chapter - be it when Avilez considers how the dramatist, Ed Bullins, disrupts the rhetoric of innocence in JoAnne!!! or how Adrian Piper prominently features racial and sexual anxieties in Vanilla Nightmares or how poet, Cornelius Eady, employs performative techniques to question the social construction of Whiteness – is the sense that to understand how Whiteness circulates throughout society is to also understand where, when, and how Blackness operates in our cultural imaginary. If we fail to comprehend how Whiteness functions, what its mechanisms are, and when it is employed, we cannot introduce modes of identification and self-articulation that more fully recognize the whole person.
“The Suspicion of Kinship: Critiquing the Construct of Black Unity” builds on Chapter One by extending this idea of closing the ranks whereby “there are recognizable or agreed upon boundaries of identity” and examines how Black collectivity is imagined (61). Rather than show how fictions of kinship are utilized to promote community, the artists examined in this chapter – Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and John A. Williams – all invoke the logic of kinship in order to later dismantle it. Of importance here is an analysis of the historical novel, a genre that is has been linked to ideas about national consciousness and collective identity. These artists show the psychic and material costs that accompany repeated calls for unity and community. The section on Gloria Naylor’s 1996 is especially provocative and finely argued as it considers the unique structure of the text, its uncanny resemblance to the author, and its place of publication concurrently. It is here that Avilez captures how experimental texts push their generic limits and conflate fact and fiction to reimagine the boundaries of kinship.
The second part of the book “The Bodily Logic of Revolutionizing the Mind” contains chapters that address issues related to reproduction and gender expression to query how black corporeality functions in nationalist thought. Chapter Three, “The Demands on Reproduction: Worrying the Limits of Gender”, takes up how black reproduction has been imagined as a threat in American society. The artists represented in this chapter like Faith Ringgold and Toni Morrison do not reject reproduction but they question its assumed relationship to fixed gender roles. They also recreate the anxieties that surround reproductive lineage in their respective texts. If the body serves as one of the vehicles for actualizing revolution, then the artists examined here probe and posit anew the limits of the black body.  
Similarly, Chapter Four, “The Space of Sex: Reconfiguring the Coordinates of Subjectivity”, points to artists who utilize the tool of the erotic to upend stereotypes that marginalize Black sexuality. The artists discussed here create narratives and subjects who embrace stereotypes associated with black bodies to shift the parameters of the social landscape from which they operate.   
Given our historical moment – one that will soon witness the end of an era for the first Black President, one where students of color are leading protest movements at institutions of higher education, one where black artists are reclaiming and repositioning their heritage in the public sphere – Radical Aesthetics is more than timely, it is essential – required reading, if you will. Whether we call it radical or not, in spite of all of the recent attacks on black life, domestic and abroad, black art and black power are more potent and prevalent than ever, and Avilez himself teaches us to locate that radicalism in unexpected places and look for the art that no doubt accompanies it.
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Sasha Panaram is Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. A Georgetown University alumna, her scholarly interests are in black diasporic literature, black feminisms, and visual cultures.
Other essays from Sasha Panaram:
Beyond Real(ism)--Review of Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form & Social Critique in African American Culture
The Watcher, The Watched, and The Witness – On (T)ERROR