Beauty as Scholarly Intervention

Last winter, i was thinking about the song "Conversation Blues" by Lightnin' Hopkins and Sonny Terry. Last winter, I was thinking about what Achille Mbembe calls "the logics of composition" ("The Power"). I was exploring Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation" method ("Venus" 11) and Jennifer C. Nash's "beautiful writing," her "new scholarly language" (104). I was listening to recordings of Pete Seeger singing "Guantanamera" in Spanish with a live audience singing along. At the same time, I was finishing my master's degree work at Queen's University. In seminar after seminar, professors encouraged us to come up with something "original," to "contribute a new idea." For a kid who grew up on folk music, this simply did not make sense to me.

I understand the process of making—song-making, art-making, story-making, knowledge-making—to be reiterative. The folk tradition is inherently iterative and replicative. You sing old songs, add parts, omit verses, rewrite, reimagine, and collage contemporary and traditional lyrical and musical styles. Like Lightnin' and Sonny, you are constantly in conversation with other singers, those who have come before and those who will come after.

I launched Hyacinth Podcast just before heading to Queen's as a way of experimenting with merging folk music compositional methods and scholarly research methods. In the podcast, scholarly research and interviews are mixed with music and creative audio production, presenting scholarly ideas as an aesthetic experience. Conversations are collaged and research themes appear and reappear the way a refrain might repeat in a song. Each episode of the podcast required the same amount (if not more) of scholarly research as the traditional papers I was writing for my master's, but I found that the process of layering scholarly and artistic content was generative in a way that my regular research and essay writing was not. The compositional nature of putting an episode together brought sonics and aesthetic quality into conversation with theory, argument, and inquiry. Suddenly, scholarly knowledge-making wasn't just about one original idea or a single scholarly voice. It was about the sound and feel of many ideas, many voices. And it was about the ways ideas could be beautiful.

By the winter of 2020, beauty became the focus of my scholarly research both inside and outside the seminar room. I dove into Hartman's 2019 text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments where she combines archival materials with creative narrative to describe the lived experiences of young African American women living in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the century. I placed Nash's idea that beautiful writing could be wielded as "a new scholarly language" to describe the kinds of knowledge that "can be sensed but not named" (104) next to Kandice Chuh's argument that aesthetic inquiry could be an antidote for the problems of the liberal humanities. Chuh argues that, rather than endorsing scholarly traditions that have the same roots as colonialism, imperialism, and the Enlightenment-era rise of the rational man, the aesthetic realm allows for forms of knowledge that are relational instead of rational. As Elaine Scarry writes in her seminal text On Beauty and Being Just: "But simultaneously, what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in the search for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation, and does all this with a kind of urgency as though one's life depended on it" (30). Beauty as fertile ground. Beauty as a language for authentic expression rather than original thought. Beauty as experience. Beauty as collaborative and relational. Beauty as conversations between ideas, not just ideas. Beauty as resistance. Finally, I had found my place. I could leave behind the cubicle study carrels and locked graduate reading rooms of the institution. I could stop pretending I would find something original to say. I could re-sing, re-tell, re-make, re-discover. I could listen more than speak and I could craft ideas into something beautiful and alive, get my words off the page and let them resonate...