Aesthetics as political? Analysing objections to the politicisation of the arts

This article interrogates the long-standing tension between aesthetics and politics in the South African literary landscape. Dominant institutional frameworks have historically privileged an apolitical conception of the aesthetic – art for art’s sake – while dismissing politically inflected cultural expression as mere ‘craft’. Against this backdrop, I argue that Black poetic production in South Africa, particularly in the work of Mzwakhe Mbuli (The Beat) and Modise Sekgothe (Zulu Helios), resists this bifurcation. Drawing on the conceptual and methodological intervention of the Black Archive, I show how their poetry stages an ontological protest – where art is not merely expressive, but functional, insurgent, and epistemically generative.Through close readings of both texts, I examine how poetic form operates as a vehicle of political critique and historical memory. Mbuli’s performative cadence and thematic invocation of dispossession, alongside Sekgothe’s cosmological lyricism and embodied poetics, demonstrate how Black artistic expression refuses the colonial separation of aesthetic form and political function. Rather than occupying the margins of literary value, these works call for a reconstitution of the literary canon – one that recognises the epistemic validity of performance, orality, and vernacular modes of knowing. The article thus contributes to ongoing debates in African and decolonial literary studies by offering a theoretical model for reading poetry as archival praxis.