| In his essay You Touch my Black Aesthetic and I'll Touch Yours, Julian Mayfield offers that the Black aesthetic "is our racial memory, and the unshakable knowledge of who we are, where we have been, and springing from this, where we are going" (26). This dissertation examines cultural memory and trauma as grounding stations when examining a poetics that operates from a position of blackness or the black radical tradition, which is merely the resistance of a language that consistently borders and creates boundaries via Nietzsche's moral driven society. Through Jacques Derrida's critique of differance and difference this dissertation will demonstrate how language comes to resist the dominant narrative of life and literature through the play of language instigated through Derrida's concept of the trace. Trace and the black radical tradition share similarities in that both should not exist, but they do through social constructions. Erica Hunt terms this existence as an oppositional poetics. By explicating the performance of Bobby Timmons and Lee Morgan of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in the song Monin, a correlation will be made through their solo improvisations which mirror the distractions language must create in order to remain free of constraints exhibited through empirical discourse in the search of aesthetic ideas. |
