Black Lesbian Aesthetics

By Briona Simone Jones

My deep genealogical study of the Black Lesbian Radical Tradition through writers like Angelina Weld Grimké, Dionne Brand, Cheryl Clarke, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, doris davenport, M. Jacqui Alexander, Cathy Cohen, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, among others, birthed Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (MOR). This collection argues that African American and Afro-Diasporic lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing by tracing the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century.

Using “Black lesbian” as a capacious signifier, Mouths of Rain includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who have self-identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word “lesbian” as a political descriptor that disrupts and critiques capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy.

[Nina Chanel Abney, “Hot to Trot. Not.” (2018)]

In this way, MOR reflects an endeavor to archive the historical, spatial, and embodied discourses by and between Black lesbian writers. MOR further established Black Lesbian Studies as a salient and serious field of inquiry. Its national success attests to the necessity of engagement with the field beyond the commodification of Audre Lorde’s work and demands that scholars turn toward the long history of intellectual production by Black lesbian writers as a whole. MOR also serves as vestibule to my second book, Black Lesbian Aesthetics. If Mouths of Rain highlights a long literary tradition, Black Lesbian Aesthetics illuminates the artistic and political contours of Black lesbian writing.

The nexus of Black Lesbian Aesthetics is connected to the following questions:

1. What would it mean to consider Black lesbian writing as a paradigm of autopoiesis, especially in an anti-black world? [1]

2. How can we return to abolitionist and anti-imperialist politics within Black Feminism and how can Black lesbian writing take us there?

3. If aesthetics can reshape our understanding of being, how can the construction of Black lesbian aesthetics teach us about the plurality of being?

4. What can an intergenerational and relational reading teach us about queer temporalities? And how can this kind of relation dismantle notions of discipline and individualism—concomitant practices within the ivory tower?

5. How can engaging the living archive of Black life offer new grammars of possibility for being human?

While teaching in Berlin, Audre Lorde posits that the black aesthetic is an authentic voice that no longer looked to white audiences for validation of their humanity. [2] In relation to Lorde, I understand “black lesbian aesthetics” as an authentic voice that no longer looks to any audience for determining humanness. What undergirds both assertions are that the category of human is governed by white power.

[Susan D. Fleischmann, “Pat Parker and Audre Lorde,” 1981]

[Sylvia Wynter, circa 1970s, Schomburg Center]

To further interrogate these genres of human, Black Lesbian Aesthetics probes into the work of Sylvia Wynter. Her work posits that there is an “overrepresentation of Man”—from Christian man, a person who has the “ability” to inhabit the land—to Columbus’s 1492 voyage, wherein rationality became the measure of subjecthood [Man 1]—to the “eugenicist and economic view of the human” [Man 2]. [3] Wynter notes that the modern world is shaped by the “overrepresentation of Man”—wherein a singular genre of being human (white, male, able-bodied, rational) is taken to be representative of what it means to be a Human Being. Those humans failing to meet the characteristics and functions of Man, those on the periphery, therefore see their plurality “reduced and negated in the name of a normative, homogenous, singular Human, generally through different pedagogical tactics, political economic techniques, and somatic violence.” [4] Wynter here is invested in the development of what she calls a new science of the word, a new science of human systems. For instance, in her essay, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” Wynter notes:

the proposal I am making is that such a discipline can only emerge with an overall rewriting of knowledge, as the re-enacting of the original heresy of a Studia, reinvented as a science of human systems, from the liminal perspective of the base, new Studies, whose revelatory heresy lies in their definition of themselves away from the Chaos roles in which they had been defined…for these have revealed the connection between the way we identify ourselves and the way we act upon/know the world (43).

Black Lesbian Aesthetics explores the multifarious ways in which Black lesbian writers have been situated at the base, while noting that this liminal perspective offers exemplars of how knowledge might be unwritten and rewritten. Black Lesbian Aesthetics describes how Black lesbian writing is paradigmatic of the epistemological shift that Wynter imagines. Black lesbians, through poetic innovation, have used language and art as their tools to shape themselves against and over the chaos of patriarchy, racism, antiblackness, and heterosexism. The practice and language that shape aesthetics—the discourses about [re]production and [re]creation—evidence that Black lesbian writing is an autopoietic paradigm of an autonomously performing, languaging, and living system. [5]

[Zanele Muholi, “Phupho” (2021)]

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Notes

[1] In “What Is It Like To Be a Human: Sylvia Wynter on Autopoiesis,” Max Hantel notes that autopoiesis, “repositions the observer, the object of observation and the experience of truth, imagining a circular and self-perpetuating relationship in which ‘seeing for oneself’ is not simply to adjudicate reality but to experience it and make sense of it through the same domain of the seeable and sayable that defines ‘oneself’ and is, in turn, partially created by ‘oneself’.” For more, see Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala, 1992, 27. Additionally, in “Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man,” Wynter states, “we are enabled to live and actualise these conceptions of being human, and therefore to be conscious of, to experience being in their culture-specific terms, only because of our capacity to tum theory into flesh, and into ‘codings in the nervous system’, this process of transmutation can be effected only by means of the system of representations in whose terms we are socialised as subjects, since it is these that function to ‘tie us down metaphysically’ to each culture’s criterion of what it is to be human” (40).

[2] See Maria Häußler and Dominik Bardow. “Part of Manteuffelstraße to be renamed after American poet Audre Lorde.” Berliner Zeitung. 16 June 2021.

[3] See, Max Hantel. “What Is It Like To Be a Human: Sylvia Wynter on Autopoiesis.” philoSOPHIA 8:1 (2018): 63.

[4] Ibid, 62.

[5] See Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980.

References

• Jones, Briona Simone. Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought. New York: The New Press, 2021.

• Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” boundary 2 (1984): 19-70.

Dr. Briona Simone Jones is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in African American literature, Feminist and Queer Theory, and Black Queer studies. With a Ph.D. in English and Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Michigan State University, Jones has published a collection of Black Lesbian writings titled Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian Thought to date. Jones is currently working on her second book, Black Lesbian Aesthetics, which is a study of the heretical shift in self-definition that transpired after the groundbreaking formation of the Combahee River Collective in 1974. Jones’s teaching philosophy includes centering the knowledge and experiences of Black, Indigenous, and Queer people of color and other underrepresented students.