"The Aesthetic Character of Blackness seeks to fundamentally change how Black representation is understood and theorized. By drawing upon the nineteenth century "discovery" and establishment of Black music during the legal waning of the slave plantation, Jemma DeCristo theorizes how Black art becomes a lofty engine of humanization that liberates the free world but does not and cannot liberate Black people. This emerging formalized Black cultural production is tracked through the writings of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alaine Lock and as well as the contemporary aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor W. Adorno. DeCristo tracks Black musics representational and anti-representational capacities in projects of black non/humanization from nineteenth century abolitionism, the founding of the recording industry, the emergence of Black queer blues performers, the rise of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and aims to theorize the contemporary neo-liberalization of Black audio-visual spectacle in post-1960s Black art"--.