Significations
by THE EDITORS
in Spring 2019
Aziza Gibson-Hunter, "Crossroads at Cameroon," 2013-14
Assertions of meaning are the foundation stone of the project of criticism. A piece of art, a poem, a story becomes meaningful when subjected to the analytical rigor of the critic. We have long known that this is insufficient. Signifyin' on the very project of criticism as well as imagining and creating critical frames grounded on signifyin' are in fact old traditions.[1]
But what if we took significance to mean something other than what literary or music critics mean? Something other than assigning value as a rare or limited quality to a particular production? What would that open up?
Signs signal, they direct. Guiding us to a place we desire to be, or believe we are destined to go. The signals are necessary, for many of us would like very much to not be lost. Yet, being lost in a place may not be the worst thing. We might discover the significance of other, unimagined terrains that call into deep question our desires or our assumed destinies.Wandering creates wonder. Wondering generates new possibilities, which lead us to new realities and new worlds.
The significance of thinking with art then may not be about a kind of precision. With A Gathering Together, we want you to lose yourself, your inhibitions, that which prevents you from desiring unsettlement. From these spaces we believe that you will become open to a significance that imagines life differently. For African peoples, this has always guided artistic pursuit. We sense this anew when we get "lost." Listen closely to Aretha Franklin, gaze intently upon the work of John Biggers. Indeed, “pursuit” is a word that perhaps too strongly describes what is at its heart, an embrace and a reaching for each other and our ancestors.
This is no call to abandon the real. For we must admit, welive and work in constant awareness that the real causes pain. But where do wego to think about worlds without such constraint? Not as escapist fantasy—aseven constructions of the fantastic are bound up with the real—but as that mode of conceiving that all that we have inherited in this world is not all that there is.We invite you to read the signs posted in this issue as directions without demands, a soft nudge rather than a hard requirement, to listen, to feel, to sense that what we are after and have always been after is a significance that exists as an alternative to a critical project, a scientific inquiry, a desire to know a fact. That in allowing ourselves to get lost and to suspend the desire to acquire a “true meaning,” we might actually discover a gentleness that remains in our art, a passion that constitutes a wonderful way to be human in the world.
[1] See the works of Deborah McDowell, Joyce A. Joyce, Barbara Christian, Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, and Samuel Floyd, among many others.