Peter Miller: The Black Ordinary

“The Black Ordinary” is a poetry-based research project exploring the exceptionalism that has come to frame Blackness in popular Western culture. From gangsta rap to Afrofuturism, images of fantastic wealth and supernatural strength have been venerated. Lying behind this exceptionalism is often the re-inscription of white, heteronormative supremacy. Black happiness and success become synonymous with the accumulation of white capital and the masculinist, ableist accrual of power. The project confronts the re-inscriptive effect of “Black excellence”, centering instead the anodyne and the arbitrary. It is deeply inspired, in this regard, by Martine Syms’ 2013 satire ‘The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto’.

“The Black Ordinary” engages with every-day, Afro-Greek space in Athens: grocery stores, street corners, public squares. The diasporic neighbourhoods of Patissia and Kypseli are key research sites. Combining spoken word with field recordings of the city, the project will produce a series of poetic soundscapes. The project also engages with the broader position of Blackness in the Attica region, saturated as it is with classical history. It considers how the reverence of ancient Greece in the Western cultural imagination has been complicit in the exoticization of the Black subject. “The Black Ordinary” confronts excellence and fantasy with humor and suspicion.