The Angel of Pathology

How do black aesthetics beckon us to transvaluate the narratively disciplined representation of care which assumes the possibility of non-pathological being? And why engage in aesthetic critique in the midst of unbearable overlapping catastrophes? In the context of black life, these perennial questions find renewed vigor in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as a large-scale interruption to the World’s designation of normality seizes upon blackness in order to establish a new societal equilibrium. This article elaborates upon Sylvia Wynter’s practice of decipherment in order to think through COVID-19 pandemic-era rap albums that can be read as placing force upon the wounded seams of social cohesion rather than stabilizing it. If Western onto-epistemic ordering employs narrative as an aesthetic ordering that violently crowds out the always already relationship between blackness and pathology, then black aesthetics have the ability to intervene into narrative, though “not [through] narrative means” (Sexton 2021, 16).