This course examines Black aesthetic traditions as sites of political thought, worldmaking, and creative resistance. Using Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings as the primary text, students will explore how Black artists theorize freedom, care, refusal, and futurity through artistic practice. The course positions art itself as a form of theory-making and emphasizes close engagement with artworks alongside theoretical texts. Students will participate in discussion, interpretation, and creative reflection, situating their own work in relation to Black aesthetic traditions without reducing them to representational identity.

Sample Readings and Materials:

• Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings (primary textbook)
• Fred Moten, In the Break (selected chapters)
• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (excerpts)
• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (selected chapters)
• Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”

CV Bailey Thomas

Dr. Bailey Thomas (They/Them) is the Eleanor M. Carlson Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Previously, they were an Assistant Professor of Philosophy (2021-2022) and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Dartmouth College (2022-2024).

Thomas’s research focuses on bridging the gaps between epistemic, ethical, and political sphere through an argument for the integration of ethical and political frameworks into social epistemology. During their time at URI they will be assisting with the organization of the Mellon event series GWS will be hosting as well as a manuscript on the concept of care as a central component of Black American feminist political theory. Other projects include an analysis of epistemic erasure and appropriation of Black feminist thought. This project responds to the current challenge Black feminists face with the decontextualization and misapplication of Black feminist theory in issues of social justice and decolonization. They have published research towards this project in a peer-reviewed article, “Intersectionality and Epistemic Erasure: A Caution to Decolonial Feminism,” in Hypatia. Next, they to publish two articles that will use this research to advance the role of Black feminist theory in our understandings of social ethics, theories of social justice, and decoloniality.

In sum, Thomas’s work develops radical Black feminist approaches to understanding epistemological, political, and ethical aspects of structural oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized people.

Dr. Thomas is also the founder and director of the annual Roundtable for Black Feminist and Womanist Theory.

Research

Social Epistemology, Black American Feminist Philosophy, African American and Black American Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Social and Political Philosophy

Education

Dual-Title Ph.D. in Philosophy and African American and Diaspora Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, 2017-2021
B.A., with Honors, in Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago, 2013-2017