I Am Superbly Disappointed to Have Missedthe Conference and Missed the Opportunity to Dialogue

Hello,

I am superbly disappointed to have missedthe conference and missed the opportunity to dialogue with you. I was looking forward to meeting everyone, and I loved your papers. Your papers inspired 3main reflections, “excitements"… Cécile encouraged me to share these with you, and I shall also post themto the MLACommons.

I also very much look forward toyour comments on my paper (brutally honest works very well for me!), and feel free to send them by email, etc. I also took notes on each paper, and would be happy to share them with you if you would like. Feel free to email me, if you would like them, and I will send them on a separate cover.

Here below are my3interrogations:

Question of aestheticsasrace, this is where I wanted my article to go, but I just didn’t have time, and it’s such a big question… and this is why I so wanted to attend these 3 seminars:

-My biggest question, which affects all of our papers is the very notion of “aesthetics” as a critical category? That is, how is “aesthetics” itself a racialized term, one that is based on a transformation of European thought based on race? Is it not essential to think through the aesthetics of (and after) Kant precisely through his explicit racism and/or the articulation of Europeanness in relation to its colonies (i.e. the work of Madeleine Dobie, Susan Buck-Morss)? That is if Éric Méchouan argues that there are three aesthetic régimes “Plato’s”; “Aristotle’s”; and “Flaubert and Mallarmé” (with overlapping of the three), is there not also the régime of aesthetics considered before and after race, that is race as an “indelible” category (that takes form from the mid-1600s), a category unlike religion, say, which is less indelible (see: Eric Weitz’s work on the indelibility of race)? [I can provide these sources, just let me know and I shall send them out.]

-Another way to think through this same interrogation of aesthetics as racialized discourse, is to examine the work of scholars who are at once at the intersection of supposedly “non-Western” “religion” and “art,” scholars such as Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, a Haitian scholar of Vodou and/or Haitian art, but also other scholars such as Carlo Célius, not to mention writer Dany Laferrière, all of whom have often explicitly dealt with and/or played with the idea of how the words “art” and “aesthetics” do not exist in Haitian Kreyòl. Yet, as Beauvoir-Dominique clearly articulates, does that mean art does not exist in Haiti? Of course not, as Laferrière ironically responds.For his part, without referencing the Haitian context, and hence making the argument something that can be interrogated across the spaces of empire (and hence ethnographic discourses) Rancière points directly to the idea that as Europe secularized, its art became sacred (that is in Eric Méchoulan’s terms, aesthetics became “a system for the promotion and sacralization of art (museum)” (60).

-And finally, how does the new “régime” of vocabulary around migration and refugee- ness affect our aesthetic (and racialized) sensibilities? Here is why I think Jiewon’s article is superb. To put perhaps Sylvain George in dialogue with other artists and cinematographers working on the migration “crisis” – that is why should it be a “crisis”? – is essential to this dialogue.

Question of mediumand how it affects race (a place that I find very exciting as regards Cécile’s, Cristophe’s, Lia’s, and Zoë’s work):

In particular:

-Question of silver screen, which comes up both in Lia’s article (p. 12) and also in Cristophe’s piece (p. 5) as silver nitrate… such different dialogues and yet related… as regards the technical aspects of photography and cinema, this is fascinating to me, and then the question beckons what happens since the technology changes, that is how are we left with a legacy of a technology of the film medium, which is largely outdated, something which then links up to Jiewon’s’s work on Sylvain George, a cinematographer who I think is extremely aware of such technical processes/transformations

Question of travel as regards edifying oneselfand one’s aesthetic sensibility… Here see for example Emmanuelle Radar’s work or Abdourahman Waberi’s work on nomadism as a critical category that at once edifies but also revises a Deleuzian-Guattarian/Braidottian notion of nomadism.

Again, I would love your brutally honest comments to my paper, feel free to send along.

With all best wishes,

ABK