Black Art, Aesthetics, and Imagination as Identity

Black Americans have created one of the most specific, complex, subtle, and multifaceted cultures in the world. The originality, potency, and value of Black American culture is reflected in the art, aesthetics, and imagination which can be found in that culture. The music, literature, performance and visual art of Black Americans has been a major foundation for what is considered popular art and culture today. What’s more, Black American art and aesthetics have been critical to the formation of the Black American identity. There are also crucial connections between Black political/social movements and Black art/aesthetics, one of them being the fact that many of the major movements in both Black politics and Black Arts acted as sister movements, each contributing to the other in major ways. This research project will employ both the Literary Pan-Africanism framework as well as the Kawaida Paradigm in order to effectively explore the phenomena of Black American art, aesthetics, and imagination as identity. These theoretical frameworks will help to effectively analyze the Black American individual and the larger, communal Black American experience by placing the individual, the community, and the art, aesthetics, and folklore which come out of both at the center of the project. In essence, this project seeks to understand, critique, explore, and analyze Black art, aesthetics, and imagination by centralizing the experience, voice and insularity of Black American culture.