Subjugated groups lack great art only because they lack freedom

Evidence

Old Europe formerly heaped its contempt on barbarian Americans for possessing neither artists nor writers. “Let us live before asking us to justify our existence,” Jefferson wrote, in essence. Blacks give the same answers to racists who reproach them for not having produced a Whitman or Melville. Neither can the French proletariat invoke a name like Racine or Mallarmé. The free woman is just being born; when she conquers herself, she will perhaps justify Rimbaud’s prophecy: “Poets will be. When woman’s infinite servitude is broken, when she lives for herself and by herself, man—abominable until now—giving her her freedom, she too will be a poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her worlds of ideas differ from ours? She will find strange, unfathomable, repugnant, delicious things, we will take them, we will understand them.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1952

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Afro-pessimist and postcolonial critiques of measuring a people by their produced masterpieces; connects to how the book’s oppressed-group analysis anticipates later liberation discourse. — connects to: Total unfreedom can be recognized but never represented in art — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 166; Society cripples imagination so people cannot enjoy actual freedom — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 262; Freedom has no essence and therefore cannot be described like other things — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1073
• ADDENDUM: The refusal-of-opportunity argument resonates with the article on trees-as-infrastructure — in both, an oppressed or overlooked resource awaits the freedom to flourish.

Broader Connections

• Society cripples imagination so people cannot enjoy actual freedom #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 262
• Freedom has no essence and therefore cannot be described like other things #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1073