“A Beauty Full of Healing”: Black Aesthetics as Methodology

Abstract

Sylvia Wynter calls for a rethinking of the aesthetics since our current system of knowledge, which is rooted in a positivist, biocentric framework, fails to recognize storytelling as an essential aspect of humanness. Similarly, bell hooks reminds us to see, not only through sight, but in a metaphysical way that heightens our awareness and understanding – expanding our ability to engage with reality through all of our senses. Thus, this paper explores the ways in which Black aesthetics serve as method-making practices in order to reclaim the imagination from modern thinking, particularly given that the narrative of modernity has been partially constructed on the myth that Black peoples lack culture, or, alternatively, that their cultural practices are primitive and monolithic. By asserting Blackness as a situating force, Black cultural practices underscore the agentic capacity of Black peoples to create and define their own realities, rather than being merely subjects of observation. What methods do we use, then, that can faithfully portray the subtleties of Black life?

Introduction

Preface

Let me begin with Édouard Glissant (1997), ¹ who writes: “We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone” (p. 9). Through our interactions, our exchanging of stories, our artistic celebrations, we know the world and are known by others. Openly and wondrously. For Glissant, this is because the imaginary embodies the many ways through which a culture, as a collective unit, perceives and constructs its understanding of the world.

Let me, also, begin with Katherine McKittrick (2021) from whom, amongst many other storytellers, I’ve learned that methodology can be disobedient. She asserts that method-making is guided by curiosity, rather than studying an object with a few techniques and producing expected results. Instead, she calls for a methodology that is relational and can provide “an intellectual framework through which the study of black life cannot be reduced to authentic biological data… that emanates some kind of truth about racial oppression… and a solution to repair that truth…” (p. 44). That is, studies of black life that entail the abjection and the saving of the objectified figure uphold the biocentric conceptions of what it means to be human and preserve coloniality. Thus, we reject systems of knowledge that are fueled by colonial logics and establish sustained wonder, which McKittrick (2021) describes as “the desire to know” (p. 5), as a methodology that will take us towards an unknown that does not terrify.

In this pursuit of wonder and curiosity, bell hooks (1995) reminds us that “we must learn to see” (p. 71) – not only through sight, but in a metaphysical way that heightens our awareness and understanding – “the intensification of one’s capacity to experience reality through the realm of the sense” (p. 71). This distinction between seeing (of data i.e. objectively and statistically collected) and sensing (through appreciation of beauty and joy) is important because human life is “hybridly organic and meta-organic (i.e., discursive-symbolic)” (Wynter, 1992, p. 241). That is, as humans, we are essentially storytellers, “who now storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological” (McKittrick, 2015, p. 11). Sylvia Wynter (2007) further makes this distinction between how we ‘see’ the world and then come to ‘know’ of the world by building on Humberto Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis, which is the idea that the living organism fabricates an image of the world by internally processing information and that this does not always represent the world outside the living organism. To put it differently, the rules and principles through which we know of the world are not objective and are representative of an autopoetic system ² that portrays itself as universal ³ . A recursive logic that seeks to sustain itself ⁴ . This is why Wynter (1992) calls for a rethinking of the aesthetics since our present “truth-making-positivist-biocentric system of knowledge” (McKittrick, 2015, p. 59) does not take into account storytelling as humanness.

Hence, the project of decoloniality demands a de-linking from the “universal” fantasy of a local experience and enunciation that presents itself as global (Mignolo, 2012) and the hegemony of Western artistic principles. Without a reconstitution of knowing and sensing, both of whom serve as gatekeepers to a Western (post)modern frame of mind, the subaltern’s voice risks being swallowed up by the hegemony of Western epistemology and aesthetics (Mignolo, 2021). All of us, then, that have been educated to some extent beyond secondary school are entangled in the Western epistome and find ourselves in a position in which we are obligated to look behind and under “universal” truths imposed on us in order to introduce new concepts based on our local sensibilities (Mignolo & Vazquez, 2013). And, it is not an entirely tragic situation, this obligatory sense of having to constantly question. On the contrary, “if we are committed to anticolonial thought, our starting point must be one of disobedient relationality that always questions, and thus is not beholden to, normative academic logics” (p. 45).

Rebelliousness

In what follows, I explore the ways in which Black aesthetics serve as method-making practices in order to reclaim the imagination from modern thinking, or modernity (more generally). This is because “modernity has been built in part on the myth that black peoples have no culture or civilization, and on the related myth… that whatever practices black people have are primitive, timeless and homogenous” (Taylor, 2010, p. 4). This is not to assert what aesthetics should be, but rather it is to dissolve what it has been and open it to what it could be. On that note, I am inspired by the enactment of para-semiosis ⁵ that R. A Judy (2020) masterfully exhibits in his book Sentient flesh: Thinking in disorder, poiēsis in black, and his “thinking-in-disorder” (p. xii) that both “exhibits what it exposits” (p. xii) – a union of form and content. Therefore, for the moments in this paper in which I wander in order to offer thoughts that linearity doesn’t capture, to contribute to “both the field of knowing and the field of expressing the known” (Alexander, 2008, p. 7), to “expand and exalt and subvert the academic form” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 4), I invite the reader to play the role of a patient audience and bear witness to a story about the telling of stories.

Prologue

“ We Must Learn to (re)member the Things that we’ve Learned to Forget” (Dillard, 2012, p. 4)

The day I was born, there was a battle over my name. ⁶ My mother told me this story so many times that in each re-telling I learn and imagine a new detail (Dillard, 2012). I imagine my mother going through the list of names for a daughter she had been preparing since her wedding night. None of them being good enough, but finally settling for one. I can almost hear my father’s footsteps, running down the hospital corridors, eagerly writing in the birth certificate the name he has chosen for me in his dreams. Kaha: a brightness seen from afar. And because Somalis employ a multiplicity of names to denote significance or cultural value (Samatar, 1982), my mother also named me Zubeida, the best or the beautiful, and my paternal-aunt named me Fado, after my paternal-grandmother. In a patriarchal society that favored sons over daughters, I know that I was wanted. And this knowledge carries a sense of responsibility. This is because in my stories –

I represent my mother, my aunts, my grandmothers, and the rest of the women that gave birth to me.

I represent my daughters and the stories they (will) carry.

So much of what I do and will do, reflects and will reflect back on, and towards them.

I feel, then, a sense of responsibility in embodying

our stories, our memories, our knowledges, in order to define our own reality and shape how we want to be known.

This is the onto-epistemology that I carry in my names and that shapes my approach to research: that is, our bodies and names are stories and through stories we learn of the world. Most importantly, these stories/knowledges are wanted by us and they are for us. Cynthia Dillard (2008) reminds us that acts of teaching and research are rooted in re-membering and that “our memories and ways of being with/in them are always and in all ways also political, cultural, situated, embodied, maybe even spiritual: they are alive and present within us” (p. 89). An exploration of memory is important in teaching and research because it guides our political expertise: “our ability to know and decide when and how and to whom questions should be asked” (p. 90). It’s an intimate act of coming in full circle.

I was Raised in Poetry

For as far back as I can remember, my father used to have a book of poetry that he kept by his bed, and he would read a poem for me whenever I asked or whenever he caught me trying to read one – the words bouncing around on my tongue, trying to find the tune. It was a thick book covered in a grayish cloth material that felt scratchy to touch, its title only on its spine. It didn’t matter to me that I didn’t fully understand the words. I just wanted to hear the musicality in his voice as he chanted the verses. Said Samatar (1982) explains that poetry in the Somali language is not simply read or recited, instead “every Somali poem has a melody or tune to which it is chanted” (p. 62). I was raised in poetry. However, as I grew older, I discovered that the teachers at school didn’t see the poetry that I carried as a small Black, Muslim, English-language-learner-looking child and began to see myself as they saw me ⁷ . A moment captured more aptly by Margaret Walker (1942), who in her poem For My People writes:

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood.

The memory of this bitter discovery calls on me to utilize in my research a way of knowing that is committed to beauty and wholeness and love and joy. It came with the realization that the function of my schooling was not for my “epistemic well-being, but essentially for my onto-epistemological deconstruction” (Abdi, 2015, p. 12). It was achievement gap and tests and ESL and taxi driver and tests and individualism when all I have known was community and hooyo’s stories and aabo’s poetry and spirit and togetherness. It was discovering, as a teacher at local charter schools, how the administration and teachers appraised the parents and community they served in accordance with their professions, what they did. And I wondered if they knew that –

The taxi driver is a poet.

He dreams during traffic stops, Grieving a past life while (re)membering his father’s son.

He writes his poetry in the fall and rise of his breath, A call to a response yet to come. Runtaa!

You see, his poetry permeates

And cannot be contained by print.

It is a living art that transcends and injures

The taxi driver is illiterate, they said,

mistaking his indigenous tools

for the absence of – a perpetual lacking.

To call on Samatar (1982) again, Somali poetry is unlike Western poetry, it is “a living art affecting almost every aspect of life. Its functions are versatile, concerned not only with matters of art and aesthetics but also with questions of social significance. It illuminates culture, society and history” (p. 3). This is to say that our stories and knowledges are subjective and contextual, and no one will/can retell them except for us. William Pickens (as cited in Gayle, 1972) puts it even more directly: “It is not simply that the white storyteller will not do full justice to the humanity of the black race; he cannot” (p. xvii). ⁸ The Black aesthetic, then, is inherently a decolonial option in that it assiduously opposes Western liberal ideals by putting into perspective “the subtleties and significance of black style and technique” (Fuller, 1971, p. 11). Fuller further explains that this is necessary because “the glass through which black life is viewed by white Americans is, inescapably (it is a matter of extent), befogged by the hot breath of history” (p. 6). Therefore, understanding the Black aesthetic necessitates one’s participation in its performance, instead of observing, as is often the case with qualitative research, since any form of passive observation can perpetuate the very biases that the Black aesthetic seeks to dismantle. More than an academic analysis grounded by literature review, it calls for a deep, empathetic engagement that acknowledges the full humanity of Black persons.

What methods do we use, then, that can faithfully portray the subtleties of Black life? By establishing Black aesthetics as methodology, I am assuming qualities of beauty and brilliance to be already present in Black communities, of which I am also a member of, and take on the responsibility to put “things in the proper perspective” (Fuller, 1971,p. 11). A response to Walker’s (1942) invitation:

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.

Interlude

Werbner and Fumanti (2013) describe aesthetics as an affective participatory act, in which the aesthete appreciates and creates beauty as it (continuously) comes to be in the social worlds of all performative celebration in the diaspora. This performance, “(re)created in exile through oratory, objects, foods, music, dance and drama” (p. 2), does not only emerge from a sentimental urge to recall a lost sense of ambience ⁹ , rather it is derived from a dialogic relation amongst the producers and consumers who collectively (re)define the ideals of that aesthetic performance. That is, Black diasporic aesthetics ¹⁰ create embodied cultural competences that may seem as imitative of an “original” from the surface, but instead generates a “subjective sense of ontological presence” (p. 3) that is in relation to space and time. This replication of reality that then becomes something new is derived from the notion of mimesis, which is explained by theorists like Derrida (1982) as the process in which direct replication can create differance ¹¹ .

In addition, this understanding stands in stark contrast to Salman Rushdie's (1991), a diasporic novelist, notion of ontological un-belongingness, by which he is referring to “migrants who roots themselves in ideas rather than places” (p. 124). Instead, diaspora aesthetics emphasizes “the ways in which diasporans actively mark their presence in the diaspora” (Werbner & Fumanti, 2013, p. 8). I make this distinction to note the role of Black aesthetics in place-making since doing so positions Blackness as a “situating force, a place-making apparatus that in every geographic context makes its location more meaningful, more substantial, more human” (Hawthorne & Lewis, 2023, p. 5). That is, the Black aesthetic does not signify a disconnection from place, rooting only in ideas, but rather a profound engagement with and transformation of space. By asserting Blackness as a situating force, Black cultural practices also highlight Black peoples’ agentic capacity to create, rather than merely being seen as “a subjectivity that experiences” (p. 5.). Indeed, it is to this challenge of seeing and being-seen for Black peoples that is explicated in Taylor’s (2016) exploration of ocularcentrism and critique of the dominance of vision in Western epistemology, in which the act of seeing is often conflated with understanding and truth.

In the context of research methodologies, then, this conflation of depicting what is seen as reality – such as ethnographic observations, for example – presents a conundrum. Problematizing the hegemony of sight in western epistemologies disrupts the notion that researchers can make warranted claims about “what is happening here? How?” (Bloome et al., 2022) when studying interactions of people in different contexts. This belief in making valid claims based on visual observation stems from the misleading assumption that to see blackness is to know blackness “in a world that continually frames blackness as a knowable vessel” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 17). Black aesthetics as methodology takes umbrage to this notion and rejects the superficial understanding derived from mere visuality. It calls for a methodological shift in centering the right to opacity ¹² as part of knowing, or acknowledging the right of individuals to maintain their right to be understood on their own terms, without being easily decipherable to external observers.

Let me also further define here what I mean by Black aesthetics: these are “stories, music, poetry, visual art, and [all] the beautiful ways of being black that are unarchived yet tell us something about how we can and do and might live the world differently” (McKittrick, 2022, p. 10). They embody a sense of defiance, a decolonial disobedience, that seeks to subvert imperial systems of knowledge. To be clear, Black aesthetics are not “stable objects primed for extraction, they are locations of expansive learning, imagination, memory, and study” (p. 10). That is, they are undergirded by stories and ideas that move across dominant knowledge systems and show us how to navigate through adversity.

And by centering Black aesthetics, or “black expressive culture” (Gordon, 2018, p. 19) as a decolonial method-making practice, it is not to imply that stories and storytelling are not already utilized in higher education as an ‘acceptable’ method of research. However, qualitative researchers are often tasked with the gathering of stories, not to participate in the telling of them. According to Toliver (2022), “we are the collectors of tales, charged with the task of stockpiling narratives from our research partners. We don’t add our own stories to the work, nor do we tell research stories in different ways, as the structure has already been decided” (p. xv). Let us pause here, then, and review what storying, not to be confused with the gathering of stories, can offer us.

First, we know that stories are powerful for the roles they can play for both the oppressed and oppressor. Since the act of oppression may not seem apparent to the oppressor (Freire, 2000), storytelling (as a way to name one’s reality) offers a way to communicate the experience of the oppressed. This is because stories offer a space for people to relate with one another and share knowledges across time (through generations) and space (across communities). This intersubjective way of knowing presents a stark difference to the objectivity that is so favored by academic research. Thus, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) call for challenging these claims of neutrality and objectivity through “naming one’s own stories” since “truths only exist for this person in this predicament at this time in history” (p. 57) and emphasize the situational reality of truths.

Similarly, San Pedro and Kinloch (2017) propose critical storying as a theoretical and methodological framework. In doing so, the goal is to “listen to build, develop, and share our own stories with those who have shared their stories with us” (p. 376), instead of listening to extract by asking questions unilaterally. This allows us to contextualize stories as a way of knowing and to situate relationships as central to research. Subedi (2007) explains that “this process begins with the research questions and thinking through the ethical implications of asking particular questions” (p. 441). This means that our identities (in relation to our communities) and roles as researchers do not grant us automatic autonomy to ask questions unilaterally and enter (and exit) spaces as we see fit.

As we break free from settler colonial ways of knowing, the knowledge gleaned from the telling and listening of stories gently nudges us towards establishing dialogic relationality with our research participants and disrupting the researcher-participant binary. More specifically, the dialogic spiral (San Pedro, 2013), as a method for critical storying reveals vulnerabilities in an in-between discursive space while also advancing “prior understandings of listening and speaking” (p. 117 – 118). This centers interconnectedness in which the telling of stories impacts both the listener and the teller. It is community-building as method-making.

Drawing from Freire (2000), a dialogue takes place between people that seek to name the world and “cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s “depositing” ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be “consumed” by the discussants” (p. 89). This view of naming the world informs my understanding of research as a dialogic interaction between research and participants, and not only between the researchers that write about the world. In explaining Bakhtin’s view on dialogue, Matusov (2009) writes, “people commit and invest in their ideas with the fate of their lives and without dialogue cannot transcend this ideologico-ontological imprisonment” (p. 78). To put it differently, dialogue helps us transcend the circumstances of our own being (committing to our ideas with our lives) and, thus, presents an ontological reason for engaging in dialogue. It necessitates a polyphony of voices that could be at tension with one another and allows for heterogeneity within the collective group. Freire (2000) offers an ontological argument as well by positioning dialogic pedagogy as a path to liberation and to becoming fully human. He challenges the complacency of the oppressed about how things are and calls for them to question their own conditions and changing them through dialogue. This is to say that dialogue and dialogic learning is not only an epistemic proposition, but an onto-epistemological act.

In Weaving an otherwise: In-relations methodological practice, Blockett et al. (2022) assert that the “onto-epistemological and material ways we have come to know and experience community shapes how we conceptualize and engage in relationship building and interactions in our qualitative research” (p. 55). That is, the ways in which we (discursively and materially and in all the ways) engage in spaces that (re)affirm our humanity will lead to deeper insights in cultivating these sensibilities in research. It is kinship and futurity and home and writing and world-making. For these Black queer storytellers, it is towards this consciousness that birthed the “onto-epistemological kinship space” (p. 45) that they affectionately refer to as Bella Noche’s – a response to Bambara’s (1980) invitation to oppressed readers to rethink what it means to be well and our responsibility in fostering our own wellness.

More specifically, they situate this space as a sanctuary from the ideological and material violence that they experience in the world and in the academy, and are, thus, able to express themselves, authentically and vulnerably. Borrowing from Okello (2020a), they imagine Bella Noche’s as “corporeal, a space to and of flesh, in resistance to our incessant erasure and misrepresentation in academic and nonacademic spaces” (Blockett et al., 2022, p. 47). This return to the body as a place of inquiry speaks to decolonial thought, and to Fanon’s theorization on the evisceration of the body, in particular. In order to disrupt colonial ideologies, “we must engage the multiple sites [body, mind, and spirit] in which these enduring ideologies continue to operate” (Khanna, 2020, p. 2). On this note, Okello (2020b) writes: “To be a Black man in pursuit of Black feminist thought necessarily engages my body as a site of ongoing struggle” (p. 352). This requires a deciphering practice (Wynter, 1992), which is “a reading practice that takes into account multiple social realities and differential psycho-affective fields while also exposing the intense weight of our governing system of knowledge” (McKittrick, 2022, p. 9). That is, a deciphering practice brings into view the dominant narratives that shape our understanding of the world in order to creatively explore the ways in which Black communities navigate racism. Black aesthetics, then, creates a deciphering practice that places Black worlds within a framework that is contradictory and rich in complexity, instead of viewing Blackness from a rigid binary of oppression and resistance. By contradictory, here, I am referring to Glissant’s (1997) notion on transparency and opacity and the simultaneous desire of Black peoples to be seen and understood on our own terms, while also maintaining the right to preserve aspects of our experience from being fully comprehended. This duality of being visible and inscrutable challenges the inherent assumption in qualitative research that observations and that which is seen can capture the Black experience, as we previously discussed.

Furthermore, these in-relations methodological practices (Tachine & Nicolazzo, 2022) that (re)center the human highlight the versatility of knowledges that are created in localized standpoints. According to Collins (2019), standpoint epistemology provides “distinctive angles of vision on racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist class relations for people who are differentially privileged and penalized within such systems” (p. 136). And although these situated epistemologies are often construed as opinion, the irony is that dominant groups have long used standpoint epistemology to advance their particular interests in the name of universality.

According to Hartsock (1983), the concept of a standpoint is “a series of levels of reality in which the deeper level both includes and explains the surface or appearance” (p. 2). To this regard, the Feminist Standpoint Theory aims to delve deeper into the material life of a woman in order to explicate the harmful effects of patriarchy at an epistemological level. Hartsock (1983) sought to achieve this by building on Marx’s notion of historical materialism and argued that the material conditions of women’s lives has an important role in the social construction of gender roles and the sexual division of labor. Thus, painting an overly deterministic view on women’s lives without taking into account the roles of race and sexuality.

hooks (2015) asserts that white women who take up feminist discourse make women of color “the “objects” of their privileged discourse on race” (p. 14) and seek to maintain a division of race and gender oppression – a division that only preserves their positions of authority as White middle class women. Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), however, antagonizes this division by placing the voices and lived experiences of Black women in the center and shows that “elites are not the only ones who theorize” (Collins, 2019, p. 5). By drawing from the situated knowledges of Black women and their theorizing, we are reminded of how “oppressions work together in producing injustice” (Collins, 2000, p. 18). This is why Crenshaw (1989) problematizes the conceptualization of oppression as “discrete sources of discrimination” (p. 140), and draws from feminist theory and antiracist politics in order to highlight how a single-axis framework marginalizes Black women.

In the research process, intersectionality calls for critical reflexivity, which is “a conscientious effort on the part of the researcher to examine their own personal biases, motives, beliefs, and thought processes in relationship to the research study” (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2022, p. 17). This is important because it reveals the researcher’s proximity to power and demands a deep (re)consideration of how the researcher and research participants experience (equally or differently) multiple interlocking oppressions. Similarly, to take up Black aesthetics as method-making, it means explicating one’s entry into this kind of work and answering, as Mcclendon and Okello (2021) pose: “Why are you here, and what will it mean that you were here (in this place of critical study)?” (p. 57).

In (re)learning through an endarkened feminist epistemology (Dillard, 2006) further explains that meaning is located in the intersections of the socially constructed categorizations of multiple identities and power is situated in the oppressions (power over) and resistances (power with) of marginalized people. “Power over” highlights the domination or oppression of a group of people, whereas “power with” looks at the resistances of the same group of people (Kriesberg, 1992). In that sense, understanding and amplifying the “power with” that people enact in everyday social contexts can be empowering and shifts the conversation to our understanding of (and how we know) reality. Thus, by centering the stories/work of African American women in our discourses of power, instead of positioning them as Other, we work towards disrupting and dismantling the master’s house (Lorde, 1984).

With that said, Dillard (2000) emphasizes the term “endarkened” in Endarkened Feminist Epistemology as opposed to “enlightened” to “articulate how reality is known when based in the historical roots of Black feminist thought” (p. 662). This is because language has and continues to be used as a mechanism to colonize – mentally, spiritually, and intellectually – marginalized peoples, and, thus, we must use language to reconstitute our realities: “It must be able to do something towards transforming particular ways of knowing and producing knowledge” (p. 662). It invites us to become aware of the multiple ways of doing research and deeply consider the ethical level of our work.

Epilogue

Engaging in an Endarkened Feminist Epistemology calls to attention my commitment to servitude as a researcher. Berry (2014), a critical race feminist scholar, posits that she considers herself a “servant-scholar” (p. 7) since most of her service is in amplifying the voices of those typically silenced in education. This amalgamation of servitude and scholarship resonates with my understanding of research as a dialogue between researchers and participants and reifies the relationships that are formed within this dialogue. San Pedro and Kinloch (2017) advocate for Projects in Humanization (PiH) in order to blur the line between research and participants and focus on “the dialogic sharing of stories across time” (p. 377). They argue that such an approach to educational research is urgently necessary since it voices multiple perspectives and sustains meaningful relationships through critical listening and dialogic engagements, as we discussed.

However, not all stories are for sharing since some knowledges are sacred ¹³ . An important research metaphor that Endarkened Feminist Epistemology gifts us with is “research as a responsibility, answerable and obligated to the very persons and communities being engaged in the inquiry” (Dillard, 2000, p. 663). It is on this ethical consideration that Simpson (2007) teaches us of ethnographic refusal, which is the idea that indigenous peoples control their own narratives and knowledge production, instead of being subjects of study. Thus, she asks: “Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?” (p. 78).

In drawing from these theorizations, I draw our conversation back to my initial pondering: What methods do we use that can faithfully portray the subtleties of Black life? In highlighting the inherent complexities involved in studying Black life, and the commitments highlighted by Black feminist scholars, I sought to problematize ‘studying’ Black livingness and hoped to introduce doubts about whether any ‘method’ can truly capture “the rebellious potential of black aesthetics” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 10). In short, I could not answer the question.

My goal, then, became not to integrate the knowledges gleaned from Black cultural performances or poetic expressions into existing methodologies that seek to convey material reality as it is, but rather to play on the notion that what the poet expresses is simply a simulacrum of reality (Judy, 2020). Or, to put it differently, emphasize the idea that a researcher’s observation and interpretation of reality is merely an imitation of what was observed and can not be asserted to factually present it, especially as it pertains to Black worlds. This is not to suggest that empirical research is fictional or an imagination of observed experiences, rather, it is to assert that it is something in between. To this regard, Bloome et al. (2004) use the phrase “research imagination” (p. 242) to illustrate the human complexities involved in the writing of an ethnographic study. They suggest that research reports are “a way of imagining the world and the people in it” (p. 234) and can not be separated from the researcher’s subjective perspective.

Finally, following the Black aesthetic tradition, I leave us with a profound lesson drawn from the folk songs of African enslaved peoples. Frederick Douglass (1845), in describing the spontaneous singing of the enslaved individuals while completing regular chores, wrote:

They would make the dense woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune… They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. (p. 23)

In this analysis, Douglass challenged the prevalent perception of these songs as being unintelligible and offered what is arguably the first formal analysis “of the oxymoronic character of the relation between lyric and music in Negro-song” (Judy, 2020, p. 153). By acknowledging the duality of expression in these songs – an embodiment of opacity (Glissant, 1997) – Douglass illuminated the profound depth of the enslaved individuals’ poetic expression, which seemed completely incomprehensible to their white enslavers, and exemplified a sophisticated deciphering practice (Wynter, 1992). Similarly, in our Black aesthetic method-making practices, we must aim to work through this complexity, or this oscillation between clarity and opacity (McKittrick, 2021). We must aspire to create methodologies that “speak to the heart and to the soul of the thought” (Douglass, 1855, p. 185). ¹⁴