Tawdry Reckonings

Marina Bilbija • Wesleyan University

November 18th @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

This paper examines the specter of the “tawdry” that haunts W.E.B Du Bois’s writings about democracy, race, and aesthetics. As it repeats across “The Criteria of Negro Art,” Black Reconstruction, and Darkwater, the tawdry crystalizes as a vexed and vexing minor aesthetic category, akin to those Sianne Ngai associates with commodification and mass culture. Yet for Du Bois and his contemporaries, it is an unequivocally pejorative aesthetic category. Across these three texts, Du Bois fashions the tawdry as the modality in which bad politics, faulty accounting, false consciousness, and bad aesthetics become articulated. His use of the term points to a mismatch between the realization of freedom and the pursuit of beauty (rather than their harmonization). Appositely, the tawdry indicates the incommensurability of Black freedom and U.S. democracy.

Dead Reckonings
View Fall 2024 Lecture List

Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/humanities

Wesleyan Logo