Converged Aesthetics: Blewishness in the Work of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell

Abstract

This essay examines the converged aesthetic of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, focusing on the Kosmopolitan video projects. These videos, and Russell’s work overall, resist the singular terms “Black” and “Jew,” constructing a Blewish converged aesthetic by overlaying images of Josephine Baker or a lonely, lost child walking backward with Russell’s rich and full voice singing Yiddish songs. These remarkable videos, and the projects created by Tsvey Brider (Russell and Dimitri Gaskin), disrupt assumptions about race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnoreligious affiliation in profound and important ways. I argue that this work performs convergence, thus bucking against the very insistence on antagonism that forms the conditions of possibility for racism.

Keywords

• Anthony Russell
• Josephine Baker
• The Quiet One
• race
• Jewishness
• Blackness