W.E.B. Du Bois, Carl Van Vechten, © Van Vechten Trust. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. On the Poetry Foundation website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-e-b-du-bois
W.E.B. Du Bois in his seminal text The Souls of Black Folk states, “The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing, a-singing, and a-laughing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people.” (Du Bois, 10)
Du Bois attempts to explore the seeming paradox that Countee Cullen would declare decades later: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing — To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” At once, Du Bois demands the artist render the “spiritual strivings” of the Black person in song and dance, poetry and prose, paint and cloth, clay and stone, and every form of artistic expression in between, and perhaps all at once.
In a synaesthetic symphony, a creative collage, a mixed media as creolized as Blackness itself, the artist, Du Bois declares, attempts to render meaning of the doubleness of Black existence in the United States of America, which would be torn apart except for the dogged strength of the Black body.
Theorist of religion Anthony Pinn suggests the impulse to put and pull together a being in a world, a new world predicated on literally tearing the Black body apart, in all that being Black’s complexity is nothing less than religion.
For Pinn, the impulse to religion, to complex subjectivity is to be found as much, if not more, in art than institutional or organized “religions.” Religion is the sewing of scraps of cloth into quilts, or silk screens of portraiture, or mixtapes of hip hop, or live performances at once adorning Black bodies of flesh in memories of deities of African origin, carried in the hold of slave ships, sometimes put to scale in lyrics of Anglo-Protestant slave masters, and descending in so many Orisha-Islamic-Protestant-Pentecostal-Gospel-Sermon-Speeches-Spoken-Word-Painting-Photography-Primitive-Modern-Holy-Spirit-Spiritual-Strivings. In protest and praise, pleasure and pain, of the soul, or jelly roll, the Black artist deifies the flesh of negated and ungendered Black people, adorning us in a senusal artistry of every mode of feeling, which many call soul beauty.
And yet soul beauty enters the world, a world made through European expansion, land expropriation, indigenous extermination, material extraction and African enslavement. The master is the audience, which all too often has to deem what is made … art. Saidiya Hartman has intricately complicated the Du Boisian paradox, in that in simple amusements of “making melody in one’s heart,” the Black soul may be deployed in an entangled libidnal economy for the master’s pleasure intent on masking the Black enslaved person’s pain. Indeed, the Black artists’ first task may the making or rending of their mask.
Thus, this course set out to examine questions of legitimacy and authenticity. Given that religion is proffered as the space and place apart from the white gaze, how are religions and the religious deployed in the practice of Black aesthetics to attempt to account for what white supremacy may not completely and overwhelmingly control and determine?
Finally, if not clear, this religious impulse brought forth in so many myriad expressions of Black art across time, space are always rendered through the historical specificities, contextual practices, fugitive, migratory, plantation and ghetto localities, both creolized and constructed. In the words of philosopher Paul Taylor the Black aesthetic, Black art is indeed made, assembled, not born, not transcendentally given.
With all of this in mind, “Soul Beauty: Religion and Black Expressive Cultures,” examined how religion becomes the source language and practices for Black artists to express what it means to be Black in the Americas. The primary text for the course was Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics, by Josef Sorett. Additional materials came from intellectuals and artists such as Paul Taylor, Katherine Dunham, Barbara Ann Teer, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Sarah Webster Fabio, Melville J. Herskovits, Alice Walker, Zora Neal Hurston, and Alvin Ailey among others. Course engaged literary, visual, dance, musical, and theatrical Black cultures. Course evaluation was based on weekly Canvas discussion posts, group facilitation of class readings, a short art review, and a final webpage project, which is what we now deliver to you, in the words of Du Bois: gentle reader. Please click the names above to see the fabulous work of students in this course!
Marlon Millner, M.Div., MA, ABD, Instructor
