The works of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde are foundational for readers inside and outside of the academy, who are interested in critical approaches to race and politics. Their words appear in as many memes and blogs as scholarly papers, indicating their importance for both popular and academic discourse. We are attracted to their words not only for the accuracy of their ideas and their continued relevance, but also for the style of their writing which reflects forms of thought attuned to the way that our perceptions of race and politics are not simply a matter of proper knowledge, but are structured and reinforced through aesthetic practices that organize our experience and societies.

In this lecture, I will present a preliminary version of my book project, in which I approach the works of Du Bois, Baldwin, and Lorde as Models of Black Thought, which aim to reorient our political and ethical commitments through a reorganization of our sensibilities. Each author offers a critique of racial modernity that identifies the role of aesthetic practices in constructing and maintaining systems of oppression. Their works aim to reorient our sense of reality to make these practices sensible, highlighting their sources in social and economic relationships. At the same time, they model the development of their own thought for the reader, providing guidance to develop interventions in their own contexts. The thought of Du Bois, Baldwin, and Lorde leads me to an aesthetic philosophy of race and an approach to Black thought as an engagement with ancestors that I hope will guide my practices here at the UvA.

Michael L. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Critical Cultural Theory capacity group at the University of Amsterdam, where he also teaches in Media Studies as a part of the Film Team. He has held positions as a Humboldt Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the JFK Institute for North American Studies at the Freie University Berlin, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and coordinator of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University, and a Post-Doctoral Lecturer in Structured Liberal Education at Stanford University, among others. He specializes in work in Social Aesthetics, an investigation of aesthetic dimensions of social life. He has published work in the Critical Philosophy of Race, Philosophy and Literature, American Studies, Social Theory, Political Theory, Speculative Philosophy, and most recently Band Research. In each of these arenas, he uses aesthetic feeling, art and media objects, or reflections on aesthetic theory to analyze sociological processes and their implications in the search for novel ways of organizing “social life.”