Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics

by Paul C. Taylor

Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject.

Genres: Philosophy, Race, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2016

About the author

Paul C. Taylor is Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where he also serves as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies. He is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2004), On Obama (2015), and Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016). He is one of the founding editors of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race.

Reviews

[Chelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Started reading this for my thesis. Wound up not needing it, but it was still a lovely, engaging read-- if difficult to begin (for whatever reason I had trouble getting past the first chapter).

Chapters 3 (Politics of Black Aesthetics), 4 (Dark Lovely Yet And; How to Love Black Bodies while hating Black People), and 6 (Make it Funky) were especially useful and enlightening to me, and Chapter 5, on authenticity, should be required reading for anyone interested in debating cultural appropriation.

Loved especially his discussion of Du Bois in Chapter 3-- if you read this book for anything read it for that.

[Sue Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trying to help a student show how the poetry of Maya Angelou is political—protesting white racism. Author doesn’t mention Angelou but provides a good framework.

[Serge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taylor argues that attention to Gramscian conjunctions unlocks philosophic dimensions of black aesthetic practice. He rejects the vision of a unified black aesthetic. He suggests that “to approach race critically is to refuse classical racialism, to approach race as an artifact is to accept that our race talk refers to the products of human agency and to insist on the political significance of race is to insist not just on the standard racial controversies. He offers the following phases in the development of the black aesthetic tradition: “1) creolization; 2) civilizationism; 3) counter-modernity; 4) decolonization; 5) engendering and queering and finally post-blackness.” These phases bring into relief “1) the relationship between visibility, invisibility and recognition, 2) the burdens and limits of ethicopolitical criticism, the seductions of authenticity and complications of mobility, the complexities of somatic aesthetics in anti-black contexts, the meaning of black music fo the body and the soul and 6) the dialectic of aversion and attraction in contexts of interracial exchange.”
The detour through multicultural and post-racial sarkaesthetics was a little dizzying but Taylor leverages bell hooks effectively when he notes that "multicultural integrationism is a version of invisibilization where we are invited to "eat the other." He argues that post-racialism is an essentially aesthetic matter and promotes Mieke Bal's notion of migratory aesthetics to better appreciate expressive authenticity in a globalized world. Chapter 6 "Make it Funky" is an entertaining postlude to a serious argument in favor of engaging racial asymmetries boldly and methodically.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't think a lot of the perspectives were very novel and a few times I felt like he was attacking a strawman - as in, he went after arguments that I don't think many people have. An example was the one in the chapter on music, that argues against the position that "rhythmic music is base and therefore inferior". Now this might be a position felt by people like Nietzscheans or fairly conservative intellectuals, but not the mainstream. I mean, this isn't even mentioning the fact that that... white people dance too! Europeans had their own form of dance before black people were forcibly brought to the west. So the criticism itself seems rather bizarre, as if it is coming out of nowhere. Considering all the information he produces is just observations from other academics, it comes across as more of an overhyped literature review than a serious scholarly output.

In one chapter Taylor insists that the producers of the Nina Simone biopic are giving into racism because of their use of a lightskin actor. The obvious implication is that Taylor either thnks white people discern skin tone with white sensibility. Of course, there is no empiracle proof for such a claim. In fact it's all just conjecture. It's absurd to cloak your arguments in "objectivity" when you have data, on a generally mainstream oponion, then turn around and make a contention based off of a hunch somewhere else and assert this is objective.

[Vernin]

A bit verbose but filled with thoughtful gems on how one might deepen the understanding of what is black (-ness) with regards to music, visual arts, dance, etc. In typical fashion for contemporary philosophers, many page of text are used to express common observations and sometimes obvious conclusions. The pithiness notwithstanding, Taylor probes the racialization of music and culture by blending concepts from traditional philosophy with ethnomusicology, critical race theory, post-modernism, and a host of other frameworks to argue that there is such a (dynamic) thing as black aesthetics and that its continual coming into being is both distinctive and beautiful.

I would recommend this book but sparingly.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of interesting ideas, but hard to evaluate because I know very little about the philosophy of aesthetics. Taylor is an engaging and thoughtful writer.

[Mūkonzi Mūsyoki]

Very evocative and well situated within the dense nexus of race, aesthetics, and consciousness.

[Natan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An accessible analysis of the themes and genealogy of black aesthetics. I enjoyed the treatment of a lot of the issues, but the final chapter on music was a bit lacking. This section seemed to differ in its methodology, and did not (to me) convincingly demonstrate how white musicians can be seen as outsiders in the otherwise “black” music scene, without essentializing race. The treatment of the question of how women present their hair also felt a bit thin, and perhaps misguided. Still, the book was an enjoyable introduction to themes like “assembly” and the contrast between “roots” and “routes” in the distinctive context of black aesthetics.