Dark Material: Jamaica, Mysticism, Aesthetics

Nadia Ellis
English
UC Berkeley

Dark Material focuses on the relationship between Black spirituality and aesthetics with an emphasis on Jamaican cultures in their dynamic relation to the diaspora. I am asking by what critical means we might trace religious influences in the aesthetic effects of Black literary, visual, and performance art, and in the interpretative frameworks we use to analyze these creative works. And by asking this question I am asking a corollary question of literary study: How can we describe the relationship between techniques of criticism and those techniques of perception, insight, and aesthetic judgement that are often relegated to an untheorized notion of religious belief? I propose that by lingering with an array of modern Black writers and performers who inherit a set of religious discourses and traditions, we might begin to answer these questions. Probing aesthetics of the minor, expansive accounts of materiality, and life on the edge, Dark Material centers on texts and performances that provide a Black diasporic perspective on global precarity.

Image Credit: National Library of Jamaica