Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics

Throughout black history and culture, aesthetics has long been a central concern for black thinkers and activists, and yet this important subject has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art. Black is Beautiful provides a long–overdue synthesis, identifying and exploring the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, both in the fine arts and beyond.

Taylor forges a basic philosophical framework for comprehending black aesthetics. The book consists of eight chapters, each of which discusses a web of related themes and phenomena. Each chapter begins with one or two illustrative real–world examples, and then uses the complexities of these opening cases to introduce the relevant issues.

This highly engaging book enables readers to see the multiplicity of the practices and themes gathered within the field and effectively overturns conceptual barriers that obstruct adequate recognition of the meanings of black cultural works. Black is Beautiful provides an original theory that fills a void in the expressive and theoretical resources in aesthetics literature.

Paul C. Taylor teaches Philosophy and African American studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where he has also served as Head of the Department of African American studies. Professor Taylor has provided commentary on race and politics for newspapers and radio shows on four continents. He is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity, 2003; 2 nd ed. 2013), has recently completed On Obama (Routledge, 2015), and is one of the editors of the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race (forthcoming).