
Experiments in Exile
C. L. R. James, Helio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness
Laura Harris(Author)
Fordham University Press
Published on 7. August 2018
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-0-8232-7978-4 (ISBN)
Description
Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, Experiments in Exile charts a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the "undocuments" that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, it argues that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica's experiments recall the insurgent sociality of "the motley crew" historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James's and Oiticica's projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker's inability to find evidence of that sociality's persistence or futurity, it shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew's multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James's and Oiticica's undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.
More details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
537 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8232-7978-4 (9780823279784)
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Additional editions

Laura Harris
Experiments in Exile
C. L. R. James, Helio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness
E-Book
08/2018
Fordham University Press
€29.49
Available for download
Person
Laura Harris is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Art and Public Policy at New York University.
Content
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: Experiments in Exile
CHAPTER ONE: What Happened to the Motley Crew? James, Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness
CHAPTER TWO: Dialectic of Contact: The Organ/ization and The Nest
CHAPTER THREE: Undocuments: Reproduction at the Margins
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION: Experiments in Exile
CHAPTER ONE: What Happened to the Motley Crew? James, Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness
CHAPTER TWO: Dialectic of Contact: The Organ/ization and The Nest
CHAPTER THREE: Undocuments: Reproduction at the Margins
BIBLIOGRAPHY