This article is attuned to the expressivity of quiet in contemporary Black visual culture. Building on Kevin Quashie’s elaboration of the overlooked quiet interiority in acts of Black culture that are also public and political, and deploying Fred Moten’s method of digging out pockets of freedom within Black experimental aesthetics, this article argues that the aesthetics of quiet reframe and deepen the meanings of hypervisible Blackness in cultural publics. With attention to the dance film RIP Oscar Grant (2010), the church bombing scene in Ava Duvernay’s Selma (2014), and Wangechi Mutu’s video installation Amazing Grace (2005), the article traces quiet across the performative, the textual, and the imaginative to elaborate an aesthetic mode and propose that Black quiet calls for a visual cultural studies approach that can consciously reprioritize visual archives of Black culture.
Conscious Quiet as a Mode of Black Visual Culture
