Experiments In Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, And The Aesthetic Sociality Of Blackness

Description

Comparing radical experiments undertaken by Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James and Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, Experiments in Exile charts their common desire to reconceive citizenship. Laura Harris shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and attempt to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms that constitute what she calls “the aesthetic sociality of blackness,” 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, ultimately challenging rather than rehabilitating normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. Cover......Page 1 EXPERIMENTS IN EXILE......Page 2 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 CONTENTS......Page 6 Introduction: Experiments in Exile......Page 10 1 What Happened to the Motley Crew? James, Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness......Page 26 2 Dialectic of Contact: The Organ/ization and the Nests......Page 70 3 Undocuments: Reproduction at the Margins......Page 127 Acknowledgments......Page 180 Notes......Page 184 Bibliography......Page 214 Index......Page 226