The need for a black aesthetic

Defranz and Gonzalez (2014) argue that theoretically driven black performativity helps us decipher the imperatives of blackness. Blackness in this context is developing a unity of experience/s rooted in the social– historical– political– cultural aspects of not being white. Lynn (2005) further asserts that scholars with interests in ‘race and culture’ should develop new ways at looking at the links between race, culture, and pedagogy. Therefore, black arts movements become a key driver when examining the pragmatics associated with black arts and the criminological imagination. Pragmatics studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning, and encompasses theory, conversation, approaches to language behaviour, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology. Crawford (2017) similarly sees black arts movements as taking a position that is unapologetically black, and sees the artist/s as the shaper of notions of blackness, that are ongoing and constant, that require constant reworking and revising. Counsell and Wolf (2001) see black cultural identity as the foundation of social organization reproducing and reinforcing patterns of inequality connected with structures of social power – criminal justice being one such structure. It could be argued that it is ‘counter-narratives’ that through art expresses the way in which black identities are suppressed; the mobilization of a movement can then stand to assist racial parity within society, as will be discussed in this chapter. Baraka (2011) sees black people as oppressed, with the right of self-determination, expressed through art, acting as a conduit from which to speak without restriction. This remains the valid issue where black people (offenders included) can express themselves through institutions of their own creation. Baraka goes on to state: