Academia is sometimes upheld as a place to explore new possibilities and challenge the status quo. In this eulogy to his Black Aesthetics course, Anthony Kwame Harrison laments the dwindling space for subversive Black expression in contemporary universities.
When you witness a class you once loved teaching die slowly in front of you, you question a lot. To begin with, you question yourself and wonder what you could have done to save it. I could have done more to recruit students. I could have shifted my course management and pedagogical practices to foster greater student engagement—whether that should have involved more carrots or more sticks is anyone’s guess. Certainly, I failed my students as much as they failed me. But that’s not a story anyone wants to hear—as important as it is to what happened.
I began teaching Black Aesthetics during the spring semester of 2010. The oldest archived computer file I can find is a Week 3 lecture that opens with a question: Why is understanding the institution and experience of transatlantic slavery important for a class on Black Aesthetics? I had inherited the course from a colleague. A freethinker who advised me that it was impossible to cover all aspects of a field so enormous. He therefore recommended choosing a particular subtheme. This advice, I believe, was his way of telling me that it was okay to structure the class around hip-hop music and culture—the subject of my dissertation, as well as my early-career ‘area of expertise.’
I have never claimed expertise in the institution and experience of slavery. But in the first class I ever taught at the university where I’ve made my career—a special topics class on hip hop that, as a pre-doctoral fellow, I created in the interest of facilitating my dissertation writing—we spent the first month reading W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk. It was January 2003, and in recognition of the book’s hundredth anniversary, one of the graduate-student leaders of a campus organization I was part of proposed that all students at the university be required to read Du Bois’s masterpiece. I remember three weeks into the class, one of the students—a junior college All-American transfer to our then highly ranked football team—spoke up in exasperation, proclaiming, “I’m sick of this stuff! When are we going to get to some hip hop?” For a fleeting moment, I regretted assigning DuBois. Years later, while wearing caps and gowns and lining up to begin his graduation ceremony, he told me I was the best teacher he had at the university.
In designing my Black Aesthetics course, I sought to liberate students (Black students in particular) from their captive status in classrooms that uphold normative structures that maintain the status quo. My mistake may have been assuming that today’s students were interested in my brand of liberation. The forms of liberation many of them seem to be seeking are best realized through financial means, with higher education serving as a training ground and credentialing agent.
The reasons for sunsetting Black Aesthetics—the verb sunset being an administrative euphemism that makes decisions to terminate or discontinue something seem natural and inevitable—are multiple. The most significant, from an institutional perspective, concerns faculty-to-student-credit-hour ratios in an educational environment increasingly governed by performance-based budgeting models. Given the low enrollments the past few times this undergraduate class has been offered, I am surprised the university hasn’t already closed the book on its dusky existence. Last year, nine students enrolled. This past semester, there were seven. Seven students, I’ll admit, are enough to create a supportive learning environment, where people come to know, respect, and care for one another. Some of my fondest memories from prior years, with groups as small as twelve students, involve getting together with other classes for special guest lectures, and watching almost every student in my class fist-bump, dap-up, or nod to one another as they entered the unfamiliar space. Their way of saying, “we’re community, we’re cool.”
No, it wasn’t enrollment numbers alone that signaled the death of the class. But rather, the fact that the last two semesters I taught it, quite regularly, as few as three students showed up—and a handful of times, only one student. I hear colleagues talk about attendance problems. Some blame COVID. That may be a contributing factor, but it’s far from a satisfactory explanation. At an institution governed by performance-based budgeting, it’s hard to justify a full professor repeatedly teaching classrooms with three students (or one). Thus, I made the proactive decision to stop teaching Black Aesthetics. Better to decide this on my own than to have to scramble following its inevitable last-minute cancellation by administrators as the semester is about to begin.
Acknowledging my culpability in contributing to both the data-derived and inspirational undermining of the course, I nevertheless find it worthwhile to reflect on what it means to stop teaching Black Aesthetics in 2025. Thinking expansively about the death of this course, at this particular moment, may help illuminate something about the pliable and elusive qualities of Black aesthetics amidst the shifting terms of anti-Blackness. It may help us better understand how to cultivate the subversive potential of aesthetic expression within the neo-liberal imperatives of contemporary higher education. If nothing else, this exploration of the conjunctural space from which I experience my Black Aesthetic loss may help soothe my grieving heart.
(En)Countering Epistemological Racism
Soon after taking over the course, I began fashioning my classroom as a life-affirming Black educational space. My motivation issued from an understanding of the American schooling project as fundamentally anti-Black. Whereas higher education had made great strides in developing co-curricular programs to facilitate underrepresented students’ success, both its curricula and standard pedagogies were, in my view, structured around implicit values and assumptions that stifled students, especially those racially positioned as Black. Accordingly, I envisioned Black Aesthetics as challenging the epistemological racism that deemed some ways of understanding the world illegitimate and thus excluded them. My mantra, which I rehearsed in each class multiple times per semester, went something like this:
There’s great utility in summarising readings or applying formulas to arrive at specific outcomes. These are valuable skills that have advanced society and will take you far in life. But such skills, such disciplined ways of thinking, are being taught throughout the university. In this class, I want to recognize and privilege alternative forms of knowledge, modes of knowledge creation, and ways of sharing what we know.
This effort to counter the apartheid of knowledge pervading the Academy produces moments of brilliance and disappointment. I was well aware that students from certain majors—trained to identify what their professors wanted and to provide correct results—would struggle. But I tried to teach from a place of patience and generosity, and to cultivate spaces of collaboration and empathetic engagement, where relationships mattered. I completed each assignment with my students and, in presenting our work to each other, we celebrated differences in the qualities and spirit with which we went about things. In sharing our work, I believed we revealed dimensions of ourselves that others rarely got to see. I now question a lot of this. Was I actually engaging students in the ways I imagined, or was this a sound strategy? Is it possible that I silenced them more with carrots than I would have with sticks?
Among the constellation of topics covered in my Black Aesthetics course, I chose to anchor the semester around Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s seminal treatise on Signifyin(g). In the formidable second chapter of The Signifying Monkey, Gates’s prose is remarkably challenging:
The relationship that black “Signification” bears to the English “signification” is, paradoxically, a relation of difference inscribed within a relation of identity. That, it seems to me, is inherent in the nature of metaphorical substitution and the pun, particularly those rhetorical tropes dependent on the repetition of a word with a change denoted by a difference in sound or in a letter (agnominatio), and in homonymic puns (antanaclasis). These tropes luxuriate in the chaos of ambiguity that repetition and difference (be that apparent difference centered in the signifier or in the signified, in the “sound-image” or in the concept) yield in either an aural or a visual pun. (p. 45)
Gates’ deeply theoretical dive—moving “from hermeneutics to rhetoric to semantics, only to return to hermeneutics once again” (p. 44)—is, in my view, one of the most expansive, thought-provoking, and compelling explorations of alternative modes of meaning-making issuing from a collective recognition of Blackness. Signifyin(g), according to Gates, is simultaneously a survival strategy and a way of “making fun” (p. 68).
A fabulous student, once, skipped an entire week of classes claiming to have been so taken by Gates’s writing that she initially missed her bus stop and then spent most of the week in the library “stumbling all up over” the reading, trying to understand it. “I knew right away it was not like other texts,” she wrote in a breathtaking paper she turned in one week late.
A couple of years later, I learned that the student had taken her own life. A fantastic writer who once proposed doing a striptease in front of the class when the technology for her presentation on Josephine Baker wouldn’t work, I consider the assignment she missed a week of classes for a personal treasure that she gifted me.
This past semester, the students in my class who spoke up about Gates’s chapter criticized him for using big words and being boring. They didn’t appreciate his genius maneuver of appropriating academic lexica and syntax into an act of Black aesthetic meaning-making. For Gates, it was the signifier (i.e., the way he wrote and the academic tradition he was Signifyin[g] on) that took precedent over the signified (the literal meaning of his words).
Of course, students today are learning in a different historical moment than they were in the 2010s when I first started teaching Black Aesthetics. Universities worldwide are seeing declines in humanities enrollments. In the US in particular, the end of Affirmative Action and attacks on Critical Race Theory (CTR) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have impacted not only the character of students who walk our campuses, but also the ways they engage with Black Studies courses.
Communal Knowledges and Critiques
In an underappreciated essay on the changing stakes of Black popular culture in the late twentieth century, Mark Anthony Neal explained that “hip hop emerged as the first form of black popular expression that was not initially afforded the process of communal critique prior to its subsequent mass production and distribution” (p. 131). Most people’s (even most Black Americans’) introduction to hip hop was as a marketplace commodity—a song, a music video, a film or television special—to be bought and sold. The fact that hip hop never had an opportunity to mature in a life-affirming Black cultural space left it susceptible to competing commercial incentives (not all of which were engineered by White corporate interests).
Between the 1960s and 1990s, sites of ‘authentic’ Black aesthetic production moved from exclusive/segregated underground spaces to spectacularly mainstream ones. With the subsequent rise of the internet, social media, and user-generated content, this shift has only intensified. Today’s popular entertainers, writes Paul C. Taylor, “become popular in part based on their mastery of the conventions that once set black musical contexts apart” (p. 177).
The same confluence of cultural forces that facilitated the global proliferation of Black aesthetics has transformed how people who have been racially positioned as Black engage with them, as well as what they ask of them. The most fascinating aspect of the animated discussions of cultural appropriation that regularly came up in my class was that appropriation continued to matter at all—particularly at a time when the influence of this unquantifiable thing we understand as Blackness has become so ubiquitous that, to many people, it goes unnoticed. I thought by now we would be talking about the legacy of cultural appropriation.
In designing my Black Aesthetics course, I sought to liberate students (Black students in particular) from their captive status in classrooms that uphold normative structures that maintain the status quo. My mistake may have been assuming that today’s students were interested in my brand of liberation. The forms of liberation many of them seem to be seeking are best realized through financial means, with higher education serving as a training ground and credentialing agent. I recall one of the Black Studies professors I had as an undergraduate taking digs at some of his most academically driven students by explaining that they were “going to be very good at making someone else’s money.” I cannot help but think that many students today would take this as a compliment, assuming that they would also be making a good amount of money themselves.
From an early age, I was exposed to West African proverbs and, thus, recognize how they encapsulate longstanding communal wisdoms. In orally centered societies, proverbs are used to educate, to document history, and to litigate formal and informal disputes (among other things). Anthropologist Kwame Edwin Otu once told me that he used Akan proverbs as theory, in much the same way that conventional anthropology observes theories by European men named Boas, Durkheim, and Spencer. Sometime after hearing this, I began incorporating a twenty-first-century proverb assignment into my class. For several years now, about two-thirds of the way through the semester, I’ve asked students to come up with their own proverbs, drawing on experiences, occurrences, and/or relationships from their lives. Each year, I’ve been astounded by (some of) the proverbs students come up with. To offer just two:
- Better to be late and drippin’ than on time and raggedy.
- The people whose thumbs move fastest are often most detached from the world around them.
I’ve begun posting an annual list of student proverbs on social media, often to great fanfare. Following my belief that they possess immeasurable wisdom and wit that any of us might draw from during difficult times (certainly during the final weeks of a semester), I label these lists “Verbal Survival Guides.” Of course, they are also ways of making fun.
Coda
On Martin Luther King Day weekend in 2016, I attended a swimming and diving meet in support of a student-athlete I knew. To my knowledge, I was the only Black person in a natatorium filled with a few hundred people. Midway through the event, a professor I had worked with on some university committee came up to me and inquired about what I would be teaching in the upcoming semester. When I mentioned Black Aesthetics, he gave a smug look and asked, “Well, how’s that different from white aesthetics (chuckling to himself)?” I shook my head and looked away. That evening, I wrote the following poem titled My Black Aesthetic (at Virginia Tech):
I’m Sick of White MuthaFuckers
Comin up into My Face Talkin ‘bout
“Well, how’s a Black Aesthetic
Different From a White Aesthetic?”
FUCK YOU HONKY!
People who know me well may be surprised by the poem’s ending (those who know me really well may not). Sometimes, when earnestly exploring Black aesthetics, you need to experiment with racially marked voices that differ from your own to experience what their articulation feels like and what kinds of work such voices do in the world.
As the end of the semester approached, I shared my poem with a favorite student in my class. At first, she said she had never heard the term “honky” and wondered what it meant. After looking it up, she asked if she could feature the poem in the magazine she was making for her final project. When I sent her a scan of the notebook page where the poem was initially handwritten, her reply was: “This poem is just so real!… Thanks for sharing it.”
