The Black Mood: The Role of Aesthetic Affect in Black Social Life

Mzizi, Chiara

The Black Mood: The Role of Aesthetic Affect in Black Social Life

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Michaelis School of Fine Art

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This study conducts a phenomenological account of the Rhodes Must Fall Movement (RMF) through an aesthetic lens. It aims to show the existence and role of artistic affect in maintaining both political movements and black social life. By theorising on what I term, in this study, the Black Mood, I argue that particular grammars of aesthetic practice induce an atmosphere of togetherness, kinship, and understanding. Held together under the speculative framework of Black Mooding, these collective forces refuse the structural alienation described by RMF as “black pain”. Thus, the Black Mood indexes a felt sense of togetherness in the context of colonial violence and resistance to it. Structurally, the study divides RMF's aesthetic operations under the banners of Chorus, Choreography and Curating. Therein, themes pertaining to aesthetic embodiment, multi-sensoriality, memory, time, and ontology are unpacked. These ideas provide an analytical framework from which to meditate on decolonial conceptions of black protest/art that move beyond humanistic conceptions of Being. Therefore, this study hopes to make three primary interventions. Firstly, it uses the philosophical and aesthetic conception of a ‘mood' to present a phenomenological reading of RMF. Secondly, in theorising the Black Mood, I attend to decolonial and post-human conceptions of blackness that trouble the border between black social life and black social death. And lastly, in line with RMF's philosophies, I hope to sketch out a way of thinking about the role of aesthetics in socio-political negotiations of power.