Poetics of Visual Relation: Le Chaos-Monde of Black Lives Matter Street Art

Chapter 6 “Poetics of Visual Relation: Le Chaos-Monde of Black Lives Matter Street Art” engages Édouard Glissant’s notion of a poetics of Relation as an alternative way of engaging the relationship between icons and iconoclasm. This chapter reads the multiple iconographic residues and Black radical excess which manifest surrounding a Black Lives Matter (BLM)-graffiti-wall-turned-mural in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Thinking this BLM mural as a poetics of visual Relation with layers of Black radical chaos, echoes, and Western totality, this chapter unmoors the Western understanding of icons and iconoclasm as existing in a dialectical cycle. This chapter also gestures toward the inter(con)textual connections between Glissant’s poetics of Relation and Fanon’s emphasis on désordre absolu and tabula rasa. To consider that which exceeds Western Man means moving beyond the search for a singular language or object of Black iconoclasm which we can point to as neatly escaping the residues of racial icons. Such an analytical threshold of purity does Black radical thought and activism a disservice. It is about thinking multiple acts of Black iconoclasm and paying attention to how each has their own tempo and momentums just as they converge around a shared rejection of Western Man.