There is a Power whose care / Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,— / The desert and illimitable air,—/Lone wandering, but not lost.”

- from “To A Waterfowl”
by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
(First Amerikkkan Romantic Poet)

It costs so much to be in this economy. To be Black & Queer & more is a phantasm of navigation & wonder.

For the creatives among us,how do we create blueprints for things yet to be seen. The Romantic is kind of prophecy work. The distance is the belief that you’ll be able to see the possible you are imagining, its own kind of faith. 

To investigate the Romantic as a Black Queer cultural product, we must begin with Abandon. If our current popular political climate has offered us anything, hopelessness appears to be most succulent temptation, but let’s leave that. Abandon is a bit more eager than ignoring, or disregarding. This is an exercise, you will be able to return to other anxieties later hopefully lighter or more full of yourself. Abandon some needs. Like certain kinds of reason (consider their determinism). Consider how the “not normal” is as mythical as the fantastic. Lean in to the disarray. When presented with crumbling global political facades & modernization of systemic dehumanization, the ephemeral seems like escapist folly. Trust me, you cannot abandon this world but you can only hold so much of it. It can only tell us so much. Again, hopelessness could arise. A desert of possibility may present itself — that too is a mirage. Among the things we need to get by, a popular maxim is Love. Love wins. Love conquers all. Love is Love. Love is the prettiest weapon we carry & wield; but can you really describe the weight of it in your hand? When it fires, how do we attend to the wounds? Yes, these are metaphors for so many things. Love is a commodity I have fashioned here into a gun. Love is a commodity one could fashion into deadly legislation, or panic defense, or national commercial holiday. Abandon love as a singular thing. Abandon the obligations for its wonder & desire.

Here, we can turn our gaze upon Romance. After reserving it’s reductive saccharine trademark, we can begin to un-tool it from its historical context. Named for cultural era of indulgent literature, visual art, music & more, Romanticism, even in its European/Colonial contexts has desires of radical & resistive modernity. The Romantic aesthetic was born out of a rejection of the Industrial revolution & cultural rationalizations through then-modern technologies. Characterized as products created in some capacity exclusively for the artist, or with disregard for purely presentational renderings of the world, Romantic work wallows & writhes in awe. Romance attempts to locate & pressure the sublime or all-encompassing of this world, revealing a desire for a more fantastic present. Akin to the German art predecessor, Sturm & Drang — roughly translating to storm & urge — Romanticism is a swelling of delicate & undervalued needs; projecting them to, intentionally, unspeakable heights. Maybe there is an arrogance in the Romantics sense of themselves; the predilection to believe magnanimous of so much. But at the core of the Romantic is an unending impetus to elevate the noble. There is a fever for improvement, expanse, mystery. 

This is the last white boy I’m gonna mention but he does give us a good conceit from which we can depart: John Keats. One of the most notable Romantic poets offered the canon significant literary substance & scandalous fodder. The allegedly pre-gay poet writes a letter to his brother describing the “excellence of art,” where he coins the phrase negative capability. Keats describes the phenomenon as the capacity of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” & with a “sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” This concept is that the immaterial power of art shifts how we process this world. It is an art that exceeds the needs of the viewer or the creator but exists to imagine the world greater. It however is predicated on extending imaginings beyond reason. Reason, returning here to reveal its mutable, relative nature. Not a binary of to be or not, but to be able to even ask the question without needing any one answer.  

The timing of the Romantic period however was fortified to locate European thinkers as the only of the era’s kind, but the Amerikkkan project was already in full swing & the TransAtlantic Slave trade had already displaced whole generations of Africans to new lands where they arrived Black & Modern. The Black Romantic, however is simply an appropriation of the colonial fetish for beauty. As Paul Youngquist & Frances Botkin note in their introduction to Black Romanticism: 

Where nation sets the terms for agency—whether of resistance or criticism—territory, literature, and whiteness determine the means and ends of cultural production. Black Romanticism subverts those imperatives by conjuring spirits they ignore, specters of the Atlantic vortex that haunt the nation and its presumed unities.

Black Romanticism exists in a para-colonial context. The paracolonial framework encapsulates the realities of colonized people living on the land dominated by the colonizer & the ways their livelihoods can be read; including decolonizing community, neoliberal capital-building, & many worlds in-between.

The Black Romantic works against colonial projects through abandonment. A divestment from stereotype or preconception. A self-determined capacity for anything. It takes the displacement as its own departure, the diaspora as launch pad. We must then abandon any myth of post-colonization. Here, we can begin to locate the Romantic to our bodies as Black, thus making it queer. 

Though not consistently drawn out, normative mores around the Black body usually dehumanize or reduce nuance of gender, age, ability. We are never just—always too much or incomplete. The attack on Black humanity amplifies the failure we accept as gender. So let’s consider the intentional Black Queer subject. Though not exclusive to explicitly queer creative, the contemporary for the Black Romantic is deft with beyond normative aches toward more. 

Consider the conceit of Aromanticism, both the rhetoric & album by Black queer troubadour Moses Sumney.An intentional & self-care-driven rejection of the capitalist construction of monogamous intimacy, Aromanticism forces you to reimagine love & connection & the peace that comes in that. How much more one is capable of feeling when one divests from the commodity of romance. A question Sumney asks: How intimate can you get with something and still feel some distance from it? The question both unanswered & indifferent is the conceit of surviving as a Black Queer Romantic. 

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