To gather together is an act of generosity, to identify and to connect pieces from here and there in order to give them meaning and structure so as to point to some linkage, configuration or coherence—but to do so without forgetting disparity, heterogeneity, and incoherence. In his deeply important work, Black is Beautiful, A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, Paul C. Taylor engages in this careful act of gathering together, what, following Stuart Hall, Taylor calls an “assembly” of “black aesthetics,” what he defines as the “practice of using art, criticism, or analysis to explore the role that expressive objects and practices play in creating and maintaining black life-worlds” (3–6). He understands the “black” of black aesthetics in light of common-sense race-thinking in which black refers to those “who have been racially positioned as black, and to the life-worlds that these people have constructed” (11).
Taylor skillfully assembles the...
