Aesthetics of (Black) Breathing

Abstract

Abstract A meditation on (Black) breathing, this essay reflects on blackness and breathing as motile (un)representable practices. Black subjects are able to resist by breathing in spite of modernity's impulse to cut off black motion at the throat. Though deeply interested in the sounds and inner motions cohered at the head and neck, this essay understands breathing to affect matter and explores how breathing disarticulates wholeness as a practice of radically dissolving sovereign sound and form. The parentheses around (Black) attend to that which is founded on the erasure of Black liveness alongside such erasure, while also listening to those composers and aesthetes that are erased when we do not listen for their breathing. (Black) breathing is channeled into/through instruments, making it musical, and through these sonic transmutations of states of matter, possible futures are opened. The essay deploys an iterative play with punctuation and grammar to intensify the act and experience of writing alongside a chorus of voices both silenced and sounded. The entanglement of breathing, from past into future spaces, is what shifts a musical opening to a place of altered destiny. With black life cornered into visible places of antiblack state violence, in this piece we attempt to listen for, and breathe, another articulation of the world.