Anteaesthetics
Award Winner
2023: Top Books of 2023
Named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE.
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In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity.
Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.
"Rizvana Bradley's searching theory of black aesthesis traces black art's recursions through the violent origins of the aesthetic. Anteaesthetics opens a mode of reading for black art's non-instrumental exploration of abyssal descent. An incisive and energizing book through and through."—Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine
"In this brilliantly conceived and exquisitely rendered study, Bradley offers a path-breaking analysis that will revolutionize how we approach, contest, and undo the Western visual field. Anteaesthetics offers an indispensable and undisciplined new frame for black feminist theorizing."—Huey Copeland, University of Pennsylvania
"Incisive and compelling, Bradley's Anteaesthetics restores to thought and feeling a capacious sense of the aesthetic, revealing its tremendous and violent power as nothing less than foundational to a racially typified modern world."—Shane Denson, Stanford University
"Anteaesthetics limns the depths of aesthetic and semiotic violence, refocusing our theoretical vision. This is an indispensable text—a tour de force."—Calvin Warren, Emory University
"Anteaesthetics offers a new interpretive framework for the philosophical interventions black art undertakes, stressing black art's negative power."—The Yale Review
"An event in contemporary aesthetic theory."—Jean-Thomas Tremblay, New Formations
"[Bradley] calls modernity's bluff and affirms that blackness is anterior to the human and to history, and she does so to inhabit this claim and elaborate it for all its world-unmaking potential."—Film Quarterly
"The wager of Bradley's meticulous, and deeply insightful book, is that we must learn to take seriously how [the modern] subject was carved out of the foundational ontological violence of the world in the first place, and that this world remains intact."—Cultural Geographies
"I see [Anteaesthetics] as a much needed expression of the issue that it names, which is, as Bradley proposes, and I think she's right, that of how the entire field of aesthetics is constitutive of the same racial regimes that make blackness through making anti-blackness."—Tangents
