how Blackness is selectively celebrated (and contained) within the white imagination.

White people love black art until it forces them to see or engage black pain beyond caricatures and stereotypes. To avoid confronting black pain, white audiences turn to white artists who appropriate black art without substance.

do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use