One of the things that struck me when I started my doctoral studies at Goldsmiths was the exposure to Black Studies. The surprise of this unexpected encounter was twofold for me. For not only was racial politics (or, for that matter, the discourse of race) a marginal element in the curriculum of my undergraduate studies in English at a university in Shanghai, but the radicality of the black intellectual tradition was also largely obscured, during my postgraduate studies in Scotland, by the additive approach Art History often contents itself with in its endeavour to recuperate non-White and non-Western artists as part of the field’s decolonisation. [i]

At the time, I did not know what exactly I was exposed to. What I did know, however vaguely, was that I was faced with something that contains, puts forward, and demands a mode of thinking different from my habitual academic mind.

With hindsight, my entry into Black Studies (and the entry of Black Studies into my zone of attention) was accentuated by two concurrent factors. One of them is the culmination of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, an incident that set in motion an enormous wave of anti-racist protests around the world and galvanised black thinkers, scholars, artists and cultural practitioners on a new cultural front; the other factor is the shift of my own milieu from Art History to a practice-driven programme in a department named Visual Cultures, a shift that all of a sudden enabled me to engage directly with critical theory and cultural politics without the mediation of disciplinary frames.

Given the circumstances in which my encounter with the black intellectual tradition took place, what I’ve understood to constitute Black Studies does not necessarily correspond to the academic field—designated by this term—that emerged in the U.S. since the 1960s and 1970s. While much of the literature I was reading grew out of the U.S. context and especially its robust university system, I became aware of the transatlantic circulation through which black thoughts, practices, and theories have travelled and reverberated throughout the 20th century and up to the present day. Naturally, this circuitous route also led me to view the social and cultural textures of my own surroundings, England, in a new light.[ii]

The extended excursion into Black Studies I made during the first two years of my PhD has turned out to widen my perspective in unexpected yet generative ways. To give just a few examples: I’ve gained an insight in the underlying connection between the project of Culture Studies, founded at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and led by figures including the Jamaican-born scholar Stuart Hall, and issues of race and identity. I’ve come to appreciate the political significance of race in postwar British society and understand how artists of African, Asian, and Caribbean descent were once brought together under the signifier ‘black’ in the British black arts movement. I’ve come to recognise the special place of science-fiction as an aesthetics and a genre in the literary and artistic tradition of the black diaspora, and hence notice the correspondence between Afrofuturism and Sinofuturism. I’ve also, through the enchantment of dub, of jazz, as well as Black thinkers’ and artists’ engagement with these musical forms, developed an attentiveness to sound and music, which has prompted me to write on Chinese underground music from the 1990s and 2000s.

It should be evident that in immersing myself in the black scholarship my aim is not to become a scholar of Black Studies. This, despite the fact that Black Studies speaks to some of my own conditions and struggles, so much so that I would not deny my willingness to make common cause with its agenda. What I find particularly generative for my own practice in this process is Black Studies’ construction of blackness as a problem for thought, that is, the construction of a discursive and conceptual space in which questions of race, identity, subjectivity, and positionality (vis à vis the West) are critically thought, interrogated, and refashioned, with a view to produce an astute understanding of the ever-changing present as well as establish new horizons of hope. It is with these insights that I return to my own research problem, to the question of the contemporary Chinese subjectivity and its artistic expressions, to the practice of inventing conceptual tools for attuning to the desire of the contemporary Chinese subject.

FOOTNOTES:

[i] The symbolic weight of the discursively constructed and politically charged signifier ‘black’ is lost in the Chinese translation of Black Studies, highlighting the significant gap between black scholarship and Chinese discourse.

[ii] For instance, I often think of the following paradox foregrounded and discussed by art historian Kobena Mercer concerning the cultural politics of diaspora in the British context: that ‘the national peculiarities of Britain’s postimperial condition provided unique conditions of possibility for diasporic ways of seeing that sought to move beyond “nation” as a necessary category of thought.’ Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 24.