Sylvia Wynter and RaMell Ross have never met, but if they did, they would have plenty to discuss. It’s difficult to describe the work of either using discrete professional categories. During her long career, Wynter authored novels, plays, and critical essays, all of which are informed by her earlier vocation as a dancer and actor. Ross is a writer, photographer, and director of two critically acclaimed feature films who, were it not for an injury, might still be playing professional basketball. Both are artists and thinkers who merge theory and practice with the goal of creating authentic representations of Black life.
It was Bedour Alagraa, an assistant professor of African and African diaspora studies at UT Austin, who noticed the intellectual convergence between the two. She then invited Ross to be the first guest in a yearlong residency series at UT titled Rethinking Aesthetics: Sensation as Form. Organized by Alagraa and her colleague Rikki Byrd, the residency uses Wynter’s essay “Rethinking Aesthetics: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” as a launching point to discuss Black expressive culture.
The initial idea for the residency grew out of Alagraa’s writing and research on Wynter’s ideas and her surprise that Wynter’s essay wasn’t receiving more attention among the artists who expressed interest in her ideas. As a scholar of political theory and Caribbean literature, Alagraa has often been invited by artists, art museums, and fine arts departments to give lectures on Wynter’s work. But she noticed that none of the institutions she spoke at seemed interested in Wynter’s essay on Black aesthetics — a surprising oversight, she thought, given the importance of art in shaping our understanding of the world and our place in it. Wynter, who wrote extensively about how Black people have asserted their lives and humanity via culture, saw aesthetics as a way toward understanding these practices.
“In order for there to be any chance at altering our conditions, we need to address aesthetics, since it not only makes our social worlds coherent but also makes our own understanding of who we are — inside of, and enclosed by these social scripts — coherent. The aesthetic, in this way, is everything,” Alagraa says. “So, I decided that if ever given the opportunity, I would try to initiate a series that invited artists to consider Wynter’s essay specifically.”
“Rethinking Aesthetics” is both cultural theory and call to action. In it, Wynter argues that traditional aesthetics have mistakenly equated rational, secular European man with the universal human experience and that this belief system is replicated through the conventions of art and culture. She calls on Black artists to disrupt this process of replication — like scientists disrupting old ways of thinking with revolutionary new models of the universe — by creating art that deviates from European traditions and expresses a more pluralistic view of humanity.
That is exactly what Ross does. Without realizing it, Ross, who only recently began exploring Wynter’s writings in depth, had for years been following her advice to artists through the creation of his photos and films as well as echoing her ideas in his own writing.
“I’m a bit astounded by how similarly we think, how powerfully she expresses it, and how I’ve come to some similar ways of expressing things,” Ross says. “But without, of course, her rigor.”
In Ross’s first feature film, the 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, he presents a picture of a Black family in Alabama that eschews standard narrative devices in favor of immersive, experiential storytelling. But the project didn’t start out this way. Initially, Ross says, he filmed the moments he thought he needed to tell the story, moments that would convey meaning in the established language of documentary cinema. But when reviewing the footage, Ross realized that he was replicating established aesthetic conventions rather than creating something new. So, he switched course. Instead of going in with an agenda of required shots, he would film everything for as many hours and days as it took to learn from and understand his subjects in a way only an insider could.
This process allowed Ross to capture what he calls “the epic banal”: an elevation of the everyday practice of being human to art, a concept that calls to mind ideas in Wynter’s essay.
Ross further explores the epic banal in Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel about the friendship between two Black teenagers at the abusive Nickel reform school (based on Florida’s infamous Dozier School for Boys) in the 1960s Jim Crow South. The film employs a first-person camera perspective, showing us the world as seen through the character’s eyes.
“A formal decision like this is as much about exclusion as about what’s included,” says Ross. “I’m using the camera as an extension of consciousness.”
What’s excluded is a view of the protagonists through the omniscient third-person perspective found in traditional Hollywood filmmaking, a view that, according to Ross, can invite judgement and othering. Instead, his “sentient camera” asks viewers to follow the story solely through the characters’ experiences. Much of what we see is the minutia the human eye lands on as it surveys the environment — the dashboard of a car, thick cake frosting being wiped from a knife, fresh paint on a deck. The two characters appear only in mirrors or through each other’s gaze.
Both Alagraa and Byrd were struck by how well Ross’s approach to filmmaking achieved the goals set out by Wynter. It also, they thought, made him an ideal first artist for their “Rethinking Aesthetics” residency.
“The series is not only about the tangibility, circulation, and consumption of the aesthetic object (for example the film, itself), but also about the working through, overturning, or troubling of the production of Black aesthetics,” says Byrd, a scholar of visual culture and performance. “With that in mind, organizing Ross’ visit as a residency allowed for extensive time and opportunity for people across the UT campus and the greater Austin community to deepen their understanding of Ross’s practice.”
Ross’s two-day October residency was bookended by screenings of his films. In a seminar open to the public between the two events, he and Alagraa discussed Wynter’s theory and how it intersects with Ross’s work. After Alagraa provided a primer on Wynter’s artistic and intellectual trajectory and some of her key ideas, Ross read his essay “Renew the Encounter,” which he describes as a “manifesto.”
Like Wynter’s “Rethinking Aesthetics,” Ross’s piece addresses the challenges of accurately depicting Black experience and identity through Western aesthetic conventions. Specifically addressing the art of photography, he offers evocative alternatives that prioritize exploring intuition over honing technical proficiency:
Develop a photographic sensibility.
Make the camera an organ. Take it into your body. Shoot toward a personal poetics.
Consider the indecisive moment.
Free the reproduced event from the essentialization of narratives and story.
Resist most logic.
Only your experience has irreducible singularity. Most logic is functional and conditioned. Welcome the dream.
Throughout both Ross and Wynter’s work runs the idea that knowledge comes as much, if not more so, from visceral experience as from thinking. “We’re feeling beings first,” says Ross. “That’s probably something that Sylvia would say.”
What “Sylvia would say” is, of course, a bit of a mystery to many. Wynter’s writing is notoriously challenging: dense, poetic, and, by her own admission, non-linear. In a 2006 interview in the journal ProudFlesh, Wynter described her process, saying her writing “tends to come the way a flower blooms … These concepts don’t come in a linear fashion … They build up the way music builds up.”
During their seminar discussion, Alagraa noted (with a touch of jocular envy) that she spent years reading Wynter before fully grasping her ideas whereas Ross “got there on his first try.”
Ross’s Nickel Boys has a non-linear quality too. One of the character’s points of view takes the form of memory, and because the viewer encounters these recollected vignettes out of order, their meaning is not always immediately clear. Rather, the memories gradually build up the narrative the way layers of paint accrue to become the subject of a painting.
“I remember watching Nickel Boys and feeling so struck by the lucidity and beauty of his first-person perspective,” says Alagraa. “I thought to myself, ‘This is what it means to know and feel, this is sensation-as-form, in a nutshell.’”
Ross notes that a visual medium like film may be better equipped than prose to convey the fullness of human experience, because “the visual field contains more data and has a more subconscious and unconscious tie to human emotion.” Viewers take in a lot of information when we watch a film, often without realizing it — from what is shown or hidden, from where a filmmaker focuses our attention — and we form conclusions from this information. This is why aesthetic choices are so important to Ross and Wynter, because much of our seemingly objective understanding of the world is constructed and reinforced by these subjective renderings.