Michael Thomas (University of Amsterdam)

Tuesday 16 January, 5.30-7.00 pm, in Ramphal R0.03

Towards a Social Aesthetics of Race

The works of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde have been canonized as sources for anti-racist education in higher education. In this context, their works are commonly interpreted through the lens of an essentialist understanding of racialized experience and analyses of racism that bifurcate between racism as a psychological problem of ignorance or biases and as a structural problem generated by institutional powers that organize the actions of individuals. This lecture addresses this phenomenon by offering an interpretation of the works of Du Bois, Baldwin, and Lorde as models for Black thought built by translating their experiences into literary forms that reflect their own processes of shaping their mentality to intervene in racial modernity. It views these forms as grounded in an understanding of an aesthetic philosophy of race that theorizes how the racial fictions used to justify racist institutionalized habits draw upon and reinforce forms of racial sensibility that naturalize racist domination. I argue that attention to the forms of their work allow us to map their models of thought to develop forms of analyzing racism that resist the bifurcation into its psychological and structural dimensions through a focus on how these two levels interact in felt experience. In addition, their respective work on racial feeling provides a foundation for an aesthetic philosophy of race that synthesizes work in Black Aesthetics, Black Existentialist Phenomenology, Black Political Philosophy, and the Critical Philosophy of race through a theory of racial sensibility that offers epistemic and political alternatives beyond integrationist paradigms.