By Lekan Aleshe-Shittu, Staff Writer
I will be the first to admit that there is something inherently uncool about the act of writing an essay on coolness. Yet, I find the idea rather intriguing, not only because one’s proximity to perceived coolness is Oberlin's primary form of social capital, but because the phenomenon itself catapults fascinating observations about class, sexuality, and most importantly (at least in my unsolicited opinion), race, to the forefront of conversations about popular culture.
My interest in “cool,” and particularly the question of who decides who or what is cool or not, began a few weeks ago during a conversation with a friend. We were drinking tea at her dining room table (thank you, Seiami), and I realized that over the course of my Oberlin career, the principal descriptor I’d seen ascribed to non-white people was “cool.” Cool is subjective, amorphous, ephemeral, and so I wondered why certain identities were more likely to be tagged than others. It was then that she brought up the word’s philosophical and aesthetic roots in West Africa, and more specifically, modern-day Nigeria.
I could not fucking believe it. I’ve had a thousand conversations—both academic and personal—about Black peoples’ artistic and aesthetic contributions to our contemporary cultural reality. Nevertheless, I am ceaselessly shocked at the extent to which said contributions go unacknowledged in each and every artistic realm. I am quite literally graduating Oberlin with a degree in Africana Studies, but my conversation with Seiami made it rather clear to me just how little I know about the cultural impact of Africans and African-descended peoples—even after four years of studying them. And so, I thought it prudent to explore coolness not through the dominant Euro-American lens, but instead, through a wholly Afrocentric aesthetic and philosophical perspective.
In “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” an essay originally published in 1973, Yale professor and Africanist art historian Robert Farris Thompson grounds our present-day comprehension of “cool” and its consequent aesthetic and performative properties in the Yoruba philosophy of Itutu (I’m geeking the fuck out right now because I’m Yoruba ). Itutu directly translates to the English language as “cold” or “chilly,” and it often refers exclusively to temperature or weather. However, Yoruba is an incredibly complex and metaphorical language, and so many ostensibly elementary and uncomplicated words possess deeper and more intricate meanings than they originally let on. Itutu is one of them.
Itutu in Yoruba philosophy refers to the very essence of one’s character. It signifies a person who possesses a calmness, a playfulness, and a generosity of character so expansive that they remain unfazed in the face of pressure or adversity. It is effortlessness, composure, unhurriedness, an ability to comprehend the fact that human beings have no control over the external world. In Yoruba thought, this acknowledgment is submission to Àṣẹ—the governing spirit of all life forces. To submit to the fact that you have no power over the grand designs of the universe is to be the epitome of Itutu; the epitome of cool.
Itutu manifests in myriad manners: music, art, clothing, dance, language, subtle movements of the body. Thompson argues that this philosophy and its aesthetics carried over to the United States through the slave trade. It subsequently became a channel through which enslaved peoples could grapple internally with the horrors of slavery and systematic subjugation. A lifebuoy in jagged waters.
Over the course of centuries, as a distinct African-American cultural identity began to form—specifically through conversations with Black peoples’ material context and continental African traditions—the concept of cool evolved yet again. It became intrinsically tied to the jazz music scene pioneered by Black Americans in the 1940s. In Kate Grover’s “Demystifying Cool: A Brief History,” she argues that these jazz musicians “popularized cool as a way of describing both the new, more restrained style of jazz and a form of emotional and aesthetic self-possession.” Grover’s idea of an “emotional and aesthetic self-possession” is reminiscent of the core of itutu—a radical confidence, a radical presence of mind, and a radical self-assurance. The total aesthetic vocabulary of coolness is rooted in Blackness, and I find this absolutely fucking beautiful.
We live in a world with a voracious appetite for Black bodies, and witnessing how Black peoples have constantly built and rebuilt cornerstones of culture in the midst of such oppression is both affirming and ironic. Ironic, because it seems as though Blackness is constantly consumed by a willing population in tandem with active denigration, and affirming because Black peoples have continued to live and create in incredibly frightening contexts.
The concept of “cool” has been appropriated by people around the world with no reference to Blackness, and I find Thompson’s analysis of itutu so fascinating because of its choice to center an oft-marginalized identity. Black people have played significant roles in crafting the world we currently inhabit, and I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to live in a world touched by their interminable thoughtfulness and creativity.
