Infinite Essence: Black Methodology, Artful Inquiry, and the Possibilities of Black Aesthetics

Anti-Blackness, as a sociopolitical matrix, fails to acknowledge Black livingness, necessitating a departure from traditional representational modalities to engage with Black “living” in its fullness. Black aesthetics emerge as imaginative spaces, inspiring change and expansiveness, challenging normativity by centering Blackness. Mikael Owunna embodies this tradition, melding visual media, engineering, and African cosmologies in projects like Infinite Essence. By illuminating Black bodies in darkness, Owunna disrupts notions of Blackness as void, offering a method to envision Blackness beyond racialized and colonial violence. This conceptual exploration foregrounds Black methodology. Specifically, Owunna’s process illuminates several dimensions, or what I refer to as commitments, for taking up Black aesthetics as artful inquiry in research practices that I denote as forecasting, shuttering, tenderness, and gravitation.