Gallery 01:6

QUIET

The work of writer Kevin Quashie has been of great importance to Rashid Johnson and the creation of this exhibition. In his book The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012), Quashie expands the terms of black culture, through the notion of the “quiet”:

“[N]early all of what has been written about blackness assumes that black culture is, or should be, identified by a resistant expressiveness – a response to racial oppression, a speaking back to the dominant ideology, a correction of the willful errors of racist history. What else, then, can be said of race as a public discourse? Perhaps nothing; perhaps what is left is to explore other ways of thinking about black culture, not ones that ignore racism or aim to supplant the importance of a discourse of resistance, but ones that help expand how we read what black culture means.”

[…]

“Quiet: conceptually, quiet is the capacity and quality of the interior, of the inner life. In this regard, quiet is inevitable, it is essential to humanity. Quiet is not tethered to what is public; it is not the performance of a social identity. It is a manner of being that is deep within us, a being that is not always exactly quiet – it can be raging and wild, is a place of desire and anxiety; it holds all there is. … Quiet is the syntax of possibility, the capacity of the inner life. It is the unappreciated grace of every person who is black. Quiet is inevitable, one’s full-orbed life. Quiet is.”

Kevin Quashie The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012)