In The Aesthetic Character of Blackness, Jemma DeCristo theorizes the means by which black art liberates the free world but does not and cannot liberate black people. Drawing on Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke and as well as the aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Theodor Adorno, DeCristo critiques the exaltation of black culture and art’s saving power by analyzing the violence underneath aesthetic production. She tracks black music’s representational and anti-representational capacities in projects of black non/humanization from nineteenth-century abolitionism and the founding of the recording industry to the emergence of black queer blues performers and the rise of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Theorizing the contemporary neoliberalization of black audio-visual spectacle, DeCristo ultimately demonstrates that the voluptuous world of black aesthetics beautifies an anti-black world that wields black art and culture as a weapon against black life.

Jemma DeCristo is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis.

Preface. Black Art Against Black People  ix
Introduction  1
1. Emancipating the Spaces of Sonic Capture  31
2. More Nearly Members of the Family: The Ugly Hiss  67
3. Ma Rainey’s Phonograph  103
4. Music Against the Subject  133
5. Sounds Like Us: On Beautification  167
Coda. Self-Defense Against Density  207
Acknowledgments  211
Notes  213
Bibliography  245
Index