Just as important, they set a rigorous standard for further work that moves beyond opportunistic engagements with African/diasporic art, whether produced by art historians with purposefully delimited understandings of Black culture or by cultural theorists with only a glancing familiarity with the aesthetic and the racialized historicity of its conventions. Taken together, these books’ foregrounding of Black radical histories and hermeneutics helps to model the discipline’s intersectional paths forward and enrich the African-American art historian’s methodological toolbox. Broadly speaking, punitive literacy is the ability to assess how one’s body will, or will not be, subjected to state violence.” It is a calculus of risk based on the body, spaces, and networks one inhabits. Key to these efforts, and to Gleisser’s framing of them, is the notion of “punitive literacy,” which she defines as “the cumulative knowledge that allows for self-protective mobility in a penal society. ![]() Organized around a diverse cast of Conceptual and performance artists and collectives, the book tells the riveting story of how US-based practitioners working in the shadow of the third-world guerrilla adapted themselves and their tactics to a nation increasingly reliant upon the prison-industrial complex, among other modes of racialized enclosure. Gleisser’s Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987, which takes a complementary tack by homing in on the social reproduction of white supremacy and its import for art-historical inquiry. In the process, Aranke not only reorients our understanding of “the political” in art of the 1960s, but also puts tremendous pressure on art-historical conceits such as “the curatorial,” which in the Panthers’ hands does not mean protecting priceless artworks within neoliberal institutions, but rather involves preserving the bloodstained objects left in Hampton’s apartment in order to make visible the anti-Black violence that enables the coherence of American “civil society” and the ongoing expansion of the carceral state undergirding it.Ī similar set of investments animates Faye R. ![]() In Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power, Sampada Aranke provides a lyrical and materially nuanced account of how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense mobilized a range of visual media, objects, and tactics to commemorate the tragic deaths and extend the revolutionary lives of three assassinated party leaders: Fred Hampton Jr., Bobby Hutton, and George Jackson. Wilderson III-has grown increasingly central to critical thought in the art world and the academy, with especially urgent implications for art-historical praxis: How do the discipline’s notions of objecthood and objectivity shift in light of transatlantic slavery’s production of persons as property? How must art-historical methods, given their origins in racist, sexist, and colonialist epistemologies, be retooled to engage with complexities of Black life and expression that are designed to evade capture? What becomes of art history as an intellectual enterprise when the ethical imperatives and liberatory horizons of Black studies occasion an interrogation of both the discipline’s objects of analysis and its political imaginaries? This year marks the publication of two groundbreaking books that address these questions. BLACK STUDIES- as modeled by the transdisciplinary work of contemporary thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, and Frank B.
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