ABSTRACT
Thelma Golden’s formulation of Post-Black promotes disengagement from the connection between an artist’s race, artistic production, and their assumed adherence to the political position of racial uplift. Krista A. Thompson’s Post-Blackness emphasized the inability of post-modernism to account for the African diaspora’s contributions to modernity. In the wake of identity politics, Golden’s Post-Black concept “speaks to an individual freedom that is a result of the transitional moment in the quest to define ongoing changes in the evolution of African American art and ultimately to ongoing redefinition of blackness in contemporary culture”. Post-Blackness and Afrofuturism are related in that the latter offers a method of problematizing the idea that a progressive way ahead involves the dissolution of race and erasure of racial performativity. By 2007 the term “post-soul” continued to be used with the publication of significant scholarship that fused elements of post-soul and Post-Black and expanded their theoretical and pedagogical possibilities.
