POST BLACK TO THE FUUTURE: Finding Politics In Solange's 'When I Get Home'

‘Post-Black’ art is a recent and loosely coined term, attributable to Thelma Golden in 2001 as the curator of the Studio museum in Harlem. It has taken on various meanings according to various aesthetic concerns. However, the celebration of a hybrid, fluid, cultural mulattoesque sense of black identity (Ashe, 2007), and to challenge ‘blackness’ in what it is and what it can be have remained core constants of this artistic movement. Contemporary black urban consciousness with it’s dominant, highly visual and phantasmagoric aesthetic trajectories of hip-hop and R&B/soul invoke intense encounters with black bodies, and thus have become key domains for the manifestation of ‘Post- Black’ impulse and dialogue.

Black bodies have long been met with what Harvey Young (2010) describes as ‘compulsory visibility’, constituted by discourses constructed outside black bodies themselves. They have been objectifying and homogeneous, and resultantly have contributed today to the staging of ‘blackness’ with criminality within contemporary law enforcement and judicial systems. I think it is in response to this compulsory visibility that the Black Lives Matter movement took on such an important aesthetic dimension – in regaining control of black representation acting to rupture dominant sensibilities of ‘blackness’ seen in mainstream media that are often characterized by an internalized racism (Schneider, 2017). This is aesthetic politics. This dimension of political practice is about extricating sensibilities from their dominant representation, creating dissensus, or disagreement within an ontological texture of externally imposed possibilities and capabilities (Ranciere, 2004). Within aesthetic political philosophy the ‘Post-Black’ visual paradigm provides possibility in redefining black bodies in unhinged potentiality - as Solange does in the alternate, transgressive cultural worlds created in the short film. They move away from externally imposed discourses to reclaim ‘blackness’ from dominant regimes of sensibility, to reconfigure the relationship between black bodies and what is see-able, say-able and possible in the objectifying mediatized worlds and somewhat restrictive cultural landscapes ‘blackness’ finds itself within. I believe the ‘Post-Black’ impulse channelled through a contemporary black urban consciousness acts politically, by providing an artistic encounter to this emancipatory disconnection from the social and political contexts through which black bodies have disadvantageously emerged.

Solange’s self-directed film When I Get Home (2019) nurtures a strong ‘Post-Black’ impulse. An unwavering proclamation of black faith and beauty is contrasted with visual transgressions made possible by a heterogeneous aestheticization of various - traditionally ‘white’ domains of cultural signification. Escaping confinement, ‘blackness’ here manoeuvres itself through the continuously exchanging dialogues presented in the film, appearing not in defiance, but in liberatory fashion. Solange does this in the beautiful synergism produced through a ‘black’ re-contextualization (or perhaps, intertextuality) of the form and control denoted by the inhuman monotony of modernist architecture in the form of the capitalist office block - and the specific demographic of which these structures have overwhelmingly benefited; through the adoption of the somewhat imperial branding of the American Southwest; and in a certain humanism maintained within the ideals of a specifically Western conception of technological progress and utopianism - of which I will now discuss in turn - all historically and affectively distorted with the presentation of a surrealist and feminine ‘blackness’ that is unapologetic in its celebration of a new black identity. One that is not fixated in a genre or form. Rather, one that dances across the ‘schizophrenic’ relationships of the postmodern (Jameson, 1997), in a weakening historicism, on an emotional ground where new intensities of transgression and rupture have emerged.

Throughout the course of the film, Solange places herself and her host of black performers, often dancing, or seemingly in spiritual, or ritual possession within architectural spaces of modernity. This direct tension proposed by the rhythmic and other-worldly bodies against these large monotonous objects of late-capitalism acts as a subversion to the subjective and ethnically tainted social conditions associated with the rise of capitalism itself. In a scene where black bodies weave and cut through multiple and perfectly aligned cars in a way that is at once ritualistic and possessive, Solange simultaneously references black spirituality with hyper-capitalist ideals, whereby the black body acts to subvert the inhuman nature of capitalist workings through it’s metaphysical presentation - renegotiating its’s relation to these unfairly ethnically structured and institutionalized hierarchies. White reflectivity displays itself literally and figuratively on the stage(s) of capitalist order and control, which is absorbed and re-signified in the sensual repetition of black faith cast in the lyrics and aesthetics throughout the film.

The repeating lines of ‘Black braids, black waves, black skin...’ heard in Almeda seem to eclipse the spirit and body - but it is the black bodies presence in these spaces of pre-dominant ‘whiteness’ that allows a flight from pre-established and restrictive narratives. Allowing a brief, yet ethereal ascension towards the totality of a black consciousness unhinged from external demands that have perhaps restricted this expression culturally. Thus, this re-appropriation extends beyond a transgressive cultural signification, acting to grant black subjectivity with the possibility of an identity-free future away from the essentialist rhetoric tied to rigid notions of black authenticity.

The adoption of a ‘neo-Western’ aesthetic displayed through the film’s various references to horseback riding and cowboy attire posit ‘blackness’ as operating in a somewhat metaphysical space, for the American Southwest’s brand is certainly that of ‘free land’ and ‘opportunity’. This time, however, radically reworked in our escape from regimes of representation. Historically, this aesthetic has been almost entirely reserved for the white male subject, so how are we to see the cast of black performers ride on horseback through these modernist architectural surroundings - stylistic heterogeneity? But more deeply, attuning to a synonymous ‘free land’ - here the bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions of ‘blackness’ (Beverly, 2012) are expanded onto a metaphysical plane of cultural surreality. In this move, we are forced to encounter the intensities of ‘blackness’ outside the insufficient representational model, as procreated, fluid and liberated forces unrestricted by the aestheticizing of colour towards the “realization of a common humanity still only existing as an idea” (Ranciere, 2004: 27). Altering the very aesthetic-political field of possibility (Ranciere, 2004), Solange escapes signifying codes of aesthetic wholeness, fragmenting and letting free ‘blackness’ to engage dialectically across cultural genres and their political preoccupations.

Solange suggests identities both embodied and disembodied, human and post-human with the recruitment of technology and inherent ‘Afro-futurist’ stance. Emphasising digital, and somewhat cosmic subjectivities, in Can I Hold the Mic (interlude) she displays a post-human figure that seems to have merged artificial with human intelligence. She speaks of herself in excess of corporeality, escaping delimitation of both time and space, dissolved from the humanist category - with its, albeit under attack, hegemonic assertion of enlightenment ideals for the liberal white male (David, 2007). The hermeneutic shift in ‘Post-Black’ visual culture reveals itself, no longer do bodies represent ideas, experiences, and history, but bodies and their excesses of desire and imagination shape vision and experience (Beverly, 2012). Solange is thus using ‘blackness’ as a visual relation, becoming conceptualised only at the moment of fixation (Raengo, 2013), a malleable complex category that she has taken full sovereign over in expressing that which escapes the immediate reality of black bodies both materially and subjectively - through post-human and artificial realms. The final section of the film addresses black issues of visibility and objectivity in a surrealist digital landscape. Performers are seen dancing in a field of plants within a coliseum type venue, putting on a technologically enhanced show of ecstatic resonance. Solange here presents a radical black subjectivity, going so far as to reference slavery through a surrealist, almost utopian lens, promoting a fluid, multiple and unmediated reading of black bodies away from currents of objectification. I can’t be a singular expression of myself, theres too many parts too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers so many...

Can I Hold the Mic (interlude)

The ‘Post-Black’ artistic paradigm works with ‘blackness’ as a productive force engendering re- signification and dissensus, and thus, a re-configuration in the sensible fabric of aesthetic communities in our image-saturated mediatized worlds. By unearthing the complexity of black subjectivity and black experience through cultural heterogeneity and crossreferenced cultural genres in surreal and futurist landscapes, Solange disrupts what is possible to conceive, a disconnection to representation in intensities of ‘blackness’ that redistribute the capacities and incapacities held in the ‘ethos’ of the black social body (Ranciere, 2004). Politics exists everywhere if we are to consider it the disruption, or partition of sensibility in our lived communities. Expanding our notions of ‘blackness’, the ‘Post-Black’

aesthetic holds vast potential for artists to reframe the relation between bodies and the world in which they live. Post-Black to the future.