New Black Gothic
June 24, 2018 1:41 PM   Subscribe

 
...does Kanye actually do this though? I feel like he's one of the most consistently tone-deaf celebrities out there, of any race. He doesn't seem like he's navigating anything so much as just plowing obliviously through life. If he were white, he'd be white privilege incarnate.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:54 PM on June 24, 2018


I think the author is more suggesting that Kanye was starting from a similar point, see a number of his videos for example, not that he ends up coming to a similar understanding about things in the end, as that clearly isn't the case.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:23 PM on June 24, 2018


Yeah, sorry, dumb comment.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:24 PM on June 24, 2018


But it doesn’t only make one hopeless, insofar as it also provides varied contexts for recognizing how white supremacy and systemic racism continue to organize American life. The new black Gothic aesthetic thus functions in popular black art as a tool for representing black life on its own terrorized terms.

This essay is pretty brilliant, and I especially appreciate Harrison's insight in setting together "This Is America" and Sing, Unburied, Sing, both of them layered works about the ongoingness of "historic" racism.

The resolution to Sing, Unburied, Sing is something that's cast a long shadow for me: Jojo freezing and unable to tear himself away from the tree for a long time, Kayla insisting on going right up to the tree even though Pop and Jojo both don't want her to, Kayla telling the ghosts to go home, and then when they don't move, she sings to them and offers comfort. It's not a hopeful ending, but there's something there, in Kayla's defiant desire to confront and, when she can't make the ghosts leave, to transform that confrontation into a gesture of humaneness. Even though it doesn't change the circumstances, it shifts just slightly Jojo's perspective on the ghosts.

Harrison's analysis here (Kayla's song functions as "This Is America" functions!) helped me figure out why this ending worked for me as a resolution, even though very little is resolved after all the emotional brutality of the story: the terror of history's presence isn't tamed, but the perspective on the pain and how we bear it shifts. And that feels important as we keep going forward, carrying all the ghosts of the past.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 3:16 PM on June 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


Thanks for posting this. I too thought it was brilliant and insightful.
posted by medusa at 1:07 PM on June 25, 2018


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