Current Multicampus Research Groups

Experimental Black Aesthetics:
Performance, Politics, and Representation

This MRG will serve as a meeting point of UC faculty across campuses, departments, and disciplinary orientations around the shared and dynamic subject of black aesthetic practices. Following the publication of Kobena Mercer’s Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), the field of black aesthetics has begun to acquire more heft as its questions have been taken up by a diffuse group of scholars working on literary studies, black performance cultures, music, and visual culture studies Yet, a print publication specifically re-addressing the salience and new meanings of black aesthetic practices in the twenty-first century has not been forthcoming. Our MRG seeks to address these demands by creating a working group that will create a special issue of a journal and an interactive blog that addresses the newer methodological (dis)orientations and approaches to black aesthetics, including “black camp,” afro-surrealism, afro-futurism, post-blackness, and others.

Faculty PIs: Danielle Heard, English, UC Davis
Uri McMillan, English/African-American Studies/Gender Studies, UCLA