2006
Phillip Brian Harper
- Professor
- New York University
![Picture of Phillip Brian Harper](https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/85302AB2-F8A4-DB11-8D10-000C2903E717.jpg)
Abstract
This study proposes the critical urgency of abstractionist aesthetics while at the same time elaborating the means by which abstraction in general has functioned to the detriment of African-American populations. Further, this study underlines the need for a critical reinvigoration of black aesthetic abstractionism, demonstrating the relative impotence of such in African-American visual culture. This study also shows how the common understanding of African-American music in terms of a developmental narrative curtails the putative abstractionism of music, and argues that experimentalist prose constitutes the most potent mode of abstractionist aesthetics available at present.