“The negative aesthetic is the practice of …identifying and rethinking anti-Black imagery so that it becomes from a Black center. “

Although some African-born Europeans are represented within the “African” canon and do receive literary prizes from European foundations in Africa, a serious discussion about African writing is only ever concerned with indigenous writers writing from a cultural, experiential, and imaginative center of being Black. African story, therefore, includes everything that an African-centered people, or person, will write.

Perhaps a better, general definition, to distinguish one “people” from another, might define African centered writers as those who write stories about the Black experience and stories that continue the image and legacy of Black people by building and/or renewing the values of Black community. The African writer, being African centered, does not perceive “Blackness” as a limit but the vehicle for universal imagination. 

The negative aesthetic is the practice of creating imagery from a Black center and the process of identifying and rethinking anti-Black imagery so that it becomes from a Black center.

The root “neg” has an ancient relationship to the Kemetic word “netjer,” which loosely meant “divine” or “nature,” later brought into Latin imagination as “niger,” to mean “black (as the skin of Kemites).”

Bastardizations of the Latin niger have since entered modern imagination as classical and neoclassical “neg” and “nig” variations and neologisms meaning to blacken, degenerate, reverse, or “not” be at all (and all of which can be understood as an extension of Herodotus’s popular description of Kemetic nature as “reversing the natural order of mankind”).

Therefore, to define the universal Black character as “negative” is a very simple way of putting the word back into a pattern of order to mean “the condition,” or nature, of Black humanity while reversing its ‘understood’ quality of degeneration, where “negative” becomes characteristic, less indictment.

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