Black Is Beautiful by Taylor Paul C.;

Author:Taylor, Paul C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2016-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

5 Autonomy and Separatism

Having spent the last two sections exploring various ways of linking politics to expressive culture both in the black aesthetic tradition and beyond, we can turn in this section to questions about how and how much to resist these links. This is another way of raising the questions with which this chapter began. The initial formulation privileged the notion of autonomy, primarily in deference to the prevailing custom in one of the relevant areas of philosophical inquiry. In light of the preceding discussions, though, we can now state these questions in an idiom with somewhat less in the way of philosophical baggage.

To say that the guiding questions of this chapter are about autonomy is nearly to say that they are about the prospects for separatism: they are about complicating or breaking the links between the aesthetic and the political that we’ve spent the last two sections identifying. As has been noted, these questions are not peculiar to black aesthetics. They do, however, take on particular forms in and around the work of people like Marcus Garvey and Michele Wallace. Three of these forms are particularly relevant to our inquiry. First: Should culture work be separated from formal political activity? That is, should political actors insist on their autonomy from the sphere of expressive culture? (Call this Rustin’s question, after Bayard Rustin, whose form of the view Richard Iton finds most influential.21) Second: Should expressive culture be kept separate from ethico-political concerns? That is, should artists, artworks, curators, and critics demand and receive their autonomy from the burdens of ethical judgment and political appraisal? (Call this Gaut’s question, after one of the central contributors to the recent debate in analytic aesthetics over ethical criticism.22) And, finally: Can expressive culture separate itself from the influence of wider social forces effectively enough to serve as an instrument of progressive social change? That is: Can the sphere of culture work achieve some degree of autonomy from other social spheres, and thereby, paradoxically, achieve an even higher ethical purpose? (Call this Adorno’s question, after the critical theorist who, with Walter Benjamin, may have done more than anyone else to put this query on the map.23)

Here as in so many other places, W. E. B. Du Bois provides us with an indispensable starting point. In June of 1926, more or less in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, he delivered an address entitled “Criteria of Negro Art.” The address would subsequently appear in print, and mark the aging scholar-activist’s contribution to an ongoing debate over the proper role of politics in black expressive practice. The address is famous for marking out a rather controversial position on the uses – on the necessity, really – of propaganda in expressive culture. The position has clear resonances for later work by various figures in the anticolonial and Black Arts movements. But the position itself is not as clear as the most quotable phrases from the address make it appear. Attending with some care to the argument

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