Persistence, Art and Survival

Abstract

A world of possibility spills from the relation between disability studies and Black Studies. In particular, there are lessons to be gleaned from the Black Arts Movement and Black aesthetic about conjuring the desirable from the undesirable. Artists of the Black Arts Movement beautifully modeled how to disrupt essentialized notions of race, where they found “new inspiration in their African ancestral heritage and imbued their work with their experience as blacks in America” (Hassan, 2011, p. 4). Of these artists, African-American photographer Roy DeCarava was engaged in a version of the Black aesthetic in the early 1960s, where his photography subverted the essentialized African-American subject. My paper explores DeCarava’s work in three ways, namely in how he, (a) approaches art as a site for encounter between the self and subjectivity, (b) engages with the Black aesthetic as survival and communication, and (c) subverts detrimental conceptions of race through embodied acts of listening and what I read as, ‘a persistent hereness.’ I interpret a persistent hereness in DeCarava’s commitment to presenting the unwavering presence of the non-essentialized African-American subject. The communities and moments he captures are here and persistently refuse, then, to disappear. Through my exploration of the Black Arts Movement in my engagement with DeCarava’s work, and specifically through his and Hughes’ (1967) book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, we are invited to reimagine disability-as-a-problem condition (Titchkosky, 2007) and deafness as an ‘excludable type’ (Hindhede, 2011) differently. In other words, this journey hopes to reveal what the Black Arts Movement and Black aesthetic, through DeCarava, can teach Deaf and disability studies about moving with art as communication, survival, and a persistent hereness, such that different stories might be unleashed from the stories we are already written into.