Beside(s) Love and Hate: The Politics of Consuming Black Culture

Abstract

This essay explores the increasing salience of blackness in Anglo-American mainstream culture alongside persistent and increasingly mass-spectacularized violence against black people. Engaging Sylvia's Wynter's "deciphering practice" in place of aesthetic criticism, the essay argues that anti-blackness is instantiated as a "structure of feeling," and challenges the metrics of love and hate that frame contemporary anti-racist discourse. Rather, an analytic of taste and consumption guides the analysis of Jordan Peele's 2017 film Get Out, cannibalism in the Middle Passage, and blackface minstrelsy arguing that the politics of aesthetics requires an ethics beside(s) love and hate.