Abolitionist Aesthetic Praxis: Rehearsals for Reading, Sharing, and Audiencing Worlds

Abstract

This portfolio investigates abolitionist and aesthetic praxes, where abolition is understood as the determination that absolutely everything must change, and aesthetics is the entwinement of perception and experience with the assignation of meaning and value. The confluence of abolitionist and aesthetic practices rehearses the collective liberation of all beings from the Western, humanist, sense-making project of the last 500 years. The form and content of this portfolio are modelled by queer, Indigenous, Black, and feminist scholars, artists, and survivors who respond to Sylvia Wynter’s announcement of the “defining struggle of the millennium” – between Man and human (2003) – on behalf of humans who refuse Man as the exclusionary figure of Western humanist scholarship. Poetry, ceremony, and gender non-conformity are all methods of enacting change in structures of perception, inducing cooperative behaviours between beings that act counter to, and despite, the violence of ‘Civilizational aesthetics,’ where aesthetics is an integral part of the racial-colonial and genocidal project of what Dylan Rodriguez calls “white Civilization-building” (2017). These texts work with the principles of abolitionist relationality as a methodology, attending to aesthetics’ entanglements with both violence and meaningful being, and illuminating ways of relating to one another within an abolitionist articulation of aesthetics. The format of this portfolio is designed according to values and principles of abolition, encouraging a non-linear practice of reading by offering adjacent but separate texts on the recto and verso sides of its pages. The first section, a methodology for an abolitionist archive, describes these values and principles in contrast to the values and principles of Western humanism (which guide the ethics of the state archive). Three appendices expand on the methodologies outlined in this core text, exploring specific relational practices associated with the archive – reading, hosting/guesting, and audiencing – and how we perceive and make meaning when working from the values of abolitionism. Framed by my experiences making art for public spaces and marshalling in the context of abolitionist collective actions, this portfolio describes the conditions within which radical transformation can – and does – occur, rehearsing methods of changing everything as an abolitionist aesthetic praxis.