Blackness and the Aesthetics of Freedom

Blackness and the Aesthetics of Freedom Stephen Dillon (bio) A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. By Tina M. Campt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 232 pages. $29.95 (hardcover). Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. By Nicole R. Fleet-wood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 352 pages. $39.95 (hardcover). Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography. By Shawn Michelle Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 248 pages. $25.95 (paperback). In the stunning opening pages of his 2009 Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz argues that queerness is more than an identarian declaration based on sex and gender and political temperament. Something so constricted, so restricted, so regulated—a one-way street leading to the dead end of visibility—is a bankrupt dream Muñoz refuses. The gift he gives us is not the transparent, riotous declaration “I am!” It’s not sloganeering or the disciplinary dream so often called “theory.” What he offers us is more ephemeral—a gift impossible to hold and even harder to describe. Muñoz gives us queerness as what we have never been and never will be. Queerness is a methodology of desire that allows us—and it is “us,” not “I”—to “see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” so we may “think and feel a then and there.”1 Queerness, he provocatively suggests, “is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” Muñoz’s queerness is unbounded. It is an invitation to all to want more than the “prison house” of the “here and now” and the trap called the future that so often ends as the present’s new form. And yet, we may wonder: How do we see this futurity? Feel it? Touch it? And run toward it with all our fury and love and devastation and desire? Muñoz’s answer is that the aesthetic is a map to a different world that shows glimpses of itself in the here and now but can take us to an unimaginable then and there. The aesthetic, he writes, often “contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning [End Page 419] futurity.”2 For him, it is not the dead letters of the policymaker, or the speech-as-capture of the politician, or the softer violence imagined by the nonprofit that will take us to the place we want, and need, to go so that life may be that “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” In his vision, the aesthetic is a critical methodology of flight from the terror and drudgery of the now. But it also enables us to bring so much with us—the love, joy, elation, and quiet moments that make life that which we defend with everything we have. I begin with a brief return to Muñoz’s work more than a decade later because the books reviewed here also seek a path to an otherwise world through the aesthetic. And yet, if his work was a call to feminist and queer studies scholars to follow the aesthetic to somewhere else, Cruising Utopia ends with what feels like a dead end instead of a new beginning. At the book’s conclusion we are invited to “take ecstasy with me”—a reference to a song by the indie-pop group the Magnetic Fields—and bliss out on the utopic possibilities of the aesthetic. If taking ecstasy together—literally and metaphorically—is Muñoz’s clarion call, Tina M. Campt, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Nicole R. Fleetwood offer us a different point of departure.3 The struggle they propose is inspired by the utopic openings offered by the aesthetic but also the world-altering materialist visions of the Black Lives Matter movement, the black radical tradition, black feminism, and prison abolition. Their work embodies the effects of these movements on the art world, feminist and black studies, as well new trends in the study of aesthetics. They accomplish all this with dazzling prose, striking form and style, and unruly methods. Perhaps the most radical departure of the three

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