摘要：
Black Feeling and the Art of Making Sense considers how Black Arts Movement writers conceived the liberating potential of black art works and their attempts to transform black audiences through the sensory, aesthetic experiences black writings invite. Benefiting from scholarly explanations of the black aesthetic, which is typically described as an experimental artistic practice and evaluative criteria privileging black indigeneity, activism, black nationalism, and revolution, this project adds insights from affect theory to insist that the black aesthetic was also an affective concept and practice aimed at severing black attachment to Western ways of feeling while creating the feelings of a liberated future. Advancing a theory of the aesthetic as an "art of making sense," Black Feeling revisits the "functional" criteria of black art outlined by black arts practitioners. Each chapter explores writing as a mode of communication that simultaneously produces meaning and feeling, involving a complex encounter between the formal qualities of the work and the embodied, affective states it seeks to create. Through close readings of the realist writings of Lorraine Hansberry, the mournful commemorations of Malcolm X, and the surrealist fiction of Henry Dumas, this work explores the relationship between calls for a black literary sensibility and the revolutionary potential of a black mood, the generative potential of grief and the tone of erotic reverence, and the role of forms of vitality in the production of the ineffable. Ultimately, Black Feeling and the Art of Making Sense insists that the Black Arts Movement in particular, and the black radical tradition more broadly, is animated by a black freedom practice aimed at overturning the anti-black emotional meanings and values associated with blackness in the Western world, while moving readers to experience states of being that can unravel the terrible burden of racist ways of feeling within black, embodied experience.
