The Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie aptly described how she encountered 'blackness' for the first time, when she moved to the United States in 1997, 'I wasn't black until I came to America, she recalled, 'I became black in America.' To many including Adichie, identity on the continent is less burdened by racial othering, but based on other forms of ethnicity, religion  and gender, but never about the color of her skin or how that impacts her positionality in the society. 

 Before Adichie, other artists, thinkers, literary icons, and musicians of African and African American extraction have engaged this subject to varied degrees, and in many forms; to understand the origin of blackness, is to look critically at the racial dynamics within America, rooted in the philosophical and socio economic construct, which situates 'whiteness' and the privileges it denotes, at the pinnacle of socio-political order. 

The recent push towards a radical shift in national and global consciousness, emerging from recent movements such as the Black Live Matters and TheEndSars protests, challenged the policing of the ‘black’ and in the case of the ENDSARS ‘the Nigerian body’ critiquing existing structures of oppressive social orders. 

This period of uncertainty has shifted and emboldened many artists of color, to reexamine their autonomy, redefine their own positionality in the global context, informed by their lived experiences, reshape their craft and practice and utilize it as a tool to expand and bridge the gap of under representation, using art as a medium’ to interrogate erasures.

Armed with artistic freedom, they untangle themselves from the burden of expectation to adopt a more palatable, less complex identity, while they consciously focus on the complexity of what Daniel Lionel Smith described as the ‘Black Aesthetics, an open, descriptive expression[Smith1991] with many possibilities. 

It is the year 2021, and these artists, who happen to be black, are choosing how to explore their being, their ‘identity, their lived experiences and creating what Tracy Ellis defined as the “the New Black Aesthetic” (Ellis 1989) in other words a post-black aesthetic.