The Aesthetics of Literary Violence in Black Literature

My dissertation studies this dichotomy between violence and aesthetics in Black literature suggesting that the aesthetics of Black literature violently resists literary norms and creates a new aesthetic that is attuned to a literary Black consciousness. My work hopes to study violence as a kind of radical break from the norm, which is anti-Black violence. I propose a reevaluation of the Black aesthetics of violence to focus on how Black writers resist Black pathology thereby creating a Black gaze. This gaze is created through this violent irruption of Black subjectivity that is required for Black bodies to exist in America. Throughout five chapters, in a project intended to be interdisciplinary in scope and inclusive in form, I outline how the Black aesthetics of violence are integral to: the slave narrative (Chapter 2), Black drama and poetry (Chapter 3), and Black fiction (Chapters 4 and 5). I am approaching Black aesthetics from a violent perspective due to the fact of Blackness being founded on the white violent gaze against the Black body. In other words, I use violence and aesthetics together only to reiterate that violence is ubiquitous in Black texts because they wish to critique modernity’s whiteness. When we speak of the aesthetics of violence in Black literature, we are speaking to a tradition of radical beings, which is inseparable from violence. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how Black writers have long pondered the spectacle of Black violence, and that this creation of Blackness through violence refuses aesthetic norms and embraces freedom through the imagination of a new Black expressive violent tradition.