... the principle of abstraction that clearly informs Walker’s figural depictions, and on which abstractionism itself necessarily depends. The chapter then considers the myriad ways in which abstraction has in fact historically been deployed to black people’s detriment, whether in social, political...

...This chapter focuses on the difference between the lived experience of race and the political expediency of racial abstraction. It begins by analyzing two different artistic renderings of a skeleton present in Jovita González and Eve Raleigh's novel Caballero. The artistic...

...This chapter focuses on abstract painter Howardena Pindell and her controversial Free, White, and 21 (1980), a video art piece in which Pindell—playing all parts—staged a dialogue between reincarnations of herself and a caricature of a white feminist who callously debunks...

... common. Others, like naming ceremonies and invocations, are alternatives to religious rituals like baptism and communal prayer. This chapter also introduces the four ritual modes that nonbelievers use to purify themselves of religious pollution: avoidance, blasphemy, abstraction, and translation...

... of anti-slavery historiography, the archive, repetition, and abstract thinking. I discuss these issues by way of aphoristic mediations on the Simone de Beauvoir on Frantz Fanon, Derek Walcott on Christophe’s Citadel, the music of Swans, Charles Mingus, Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, the slavery historiography...

... when the rainbow is enuf Shange Harper Michael Jordan June on black culture and abstraction Shange Ntozake for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf African American expressive culture Blackness Music Pater Walter on music among the arts Abstractionism African...

...Chapter 3 focuses on the freedom to create and to interpret without restraint. This chapter explores the history of color-based abstraction and monochrome painting, unpacking the racial politics of aesthetic freedom as it has been imagined by a Euro-American avant-garde tradition. The chapter...