On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human: Two Meditations

In the Western history of ideas, light is conventionally associated with concepts such as rebirth, innovation, and creativity—exemplified by eras like the Enlightenment. This privileging of light often obscures—or altogether erases—the dark, specifically Blackness, as a generative paradigm of possibility. These two meditations, in the absence of light (black creativity blooms) and poiesis reflecting on the author’s recent book On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human, think with, through, and alongside Blackness as a site of being and becoming.