SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 57
SINE QUA NON
through the 'imported'—a literary tradition given legitimacy within U.S. cultural life—as
it concretizes and foretells how Blackness was and remains cast as foreign, excessive, and
unsuited within the U.S. body politic.
“of the blackness and my invisibility”
Unlike Dostoyevsky, however, to maintain the American literary craft and meet its
benchmark while working with new material, I argue that Ellison separated “Blackness”
and “blackness.” Whereas “blackness” is foregrounded as the “ginger-colored” man, “the
blackness” exists as a spectral character or protagonist. In a way, Ellison broke the form of
suspense in plain sight. (‘B/blackness’ references the link between the spectral and physical
forms it takes.)
To explore this, I evoke Rizvana Bradley’s ‘Black Aesthesis’ theoretical framework as a
reconciliatory lens to explain the spectral entity of Blackness and its warping of the suspense
literary element. Ellison’s work explains why “Blackness” and “blackness” are separated to
maintain the literary form. 37 ‘Black aesthesis’ critiques form itself; it is a ‘cut’ between Black
existence and Black non-being, where non-being refers to the state of Blackness, never being
a subject matter to be cultivated, only brutalized. When Bradley develops the term, she draws
on Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘aesthesis,’ which uses momentary events to disrupt aesthetic
regimes touting form and craft. 38
Rancière states:
a regime of perception, sensation and interpretation of art is constituted and
transformed by welcoming images, objects and performances that seemed…
opposed to the idea of fine art: vulgar figures of genre painting, the exaltation
of the most prosaic activities in verse freed from meter, music-hall stunts and
gags…machine rhythms, smoke from trains and ships reproduced mechanically,
extravagant inventories of accessories from the lives of the poor.39
American literary craft is a regime that incorporates and has incorporated a host of techniques,
phrasings, tones, and tempos that make aligned works easy to classify. However, can Blackness
be included in the regime? In conversation with Rancière about visual art forms, Bradley’s
intervention into visual art holds all the same for literary art. Bradley steers Rancière’s claim
into new territory and pushes against his claim in four ways as to whether “Blackness”
could be incorporated to transform art. B/blackness cannot be meaningfully or adequately
incorporated as a changeable event because it is irreducible material. Because Blackness cannot
exist comfortably within aesthetic regimes. Because it is irreducible, it cannot be understood
through dialectical or metaphoric principles. Because B/blackness acts as a barrier separating
the sensory and social worlds, it cannot force new modes of understanding, seeing as it is the
point through which understanding is lost and, through this loss, offers ways of apprehending
the world.
37
Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, Inventions: Black Philosophy,
Politics, Aesthetics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2023).
38
Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2019).
39
Rancière, x.
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