Fugitive Utterances in Modernity’s Song

This review first appeared in Art Journal vol. 83, no. 3 (Fall 2024)

Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthetics and the Critique of Form. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 406 pp.; 19 color ills.; 14 b/w. Cloth $30

Rizvana Bradley’s Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthetics and the Critique of Form seeks to radically challenge our understanding of the aesthetic, arguing that it is neither universal nor neutral. Instead, as Bradley boldly argues, the aesthetic is a racial regime of Western modernity undergirded by the Black feminine. In her words, the latter’s labor “subtends and sustains the ontology of the world, the modern aesthetic order” (67). Later, she reiterates this: “black feminine vestibularity is endlessly instrumentalized in the making and remaking of (aesthetic) forms” (226). Bradley’s counterintuitive thesis, in other words, that Blackness is a precondition of Western aesthetic discourse, its seemingly invisible support, even as it is not fully representative within that same regime, structures her ambitious and multivalent book-length exegesis. She writes from this condition of impossibility, attending to that which emerges in the gap (or “the abyssal cut” to use her evocative language) between Black existence and Black nonbeing, a recurring argument in Anteaesthetics. The recurrence of antiblackness and its attendant structural violence is neither a contemporary phenomenon nor a strictly political one, Bradley emphasizes, but inherent in the conditions that structure the aesthetic. In short, she suggests, antiblackness is “constitutive of aesthetic forms and representations” (29). Full stop. Thus, attending to the “minor refrains” (39) of Blackness within the aesthetic requires us, Bradley notes, to question the apparent coherency and cohesion of Western aesthetics and recognize it as a nefarious racial order rather than simply the distribution of the sensible.

In doing so, one of the major gripes of Anteaesthetics is the constant reduction of Black art to the merely representational—(cue Kobena Mercer’s critique of the “burden of representation” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies and Jennifer Doyle’s discussion of “feeling overdetermined” in Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art)—or simply to matters of medium specificity at the expense of its larger aims.¹ As a result, Bradley gathers a set of artists in her text whose work not only degrades neat categories and tacit understandings but also speaks to the very conditions of its unwieldy existence. After all, “even the most radical forms of black artistic expression are always already made to come before the representational violence of the racial regime of aesthetics,” Bradley cautions us (19). Take, for instance, Nina Simone, the first artist in the book’s roster, specifically her live performance of a medley of “Stars/Feelings” at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. Simone’s act of “non-performance,” as Bradley terms it, is contained within and exceeds the bounds of the aesthetic; her “gestures strain against and recede from the aesthetic” even as they are “also violently marshaled to reproduce it” (22). For Bradley, the fraught aesthetic apparatuses structuring Simone’s belabored performance are paradigmatic of the more extensive set of concerns that animate Anteaesthetics, especially the vexed dilemma of Blackness being made to appear within an aesthetic regime that cannot fully represent it and yet insists on its presence. It “cannot be but must exist” (51). This line of argumentation is woven across Anteaesthetics, such as her contemplation of The Death of Tom, a 2008 video installation by Glenn Ligon.² Ligon’s 16 mm black-and-white film initially attempted to re-render the last scene of the 1903 film Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which Tom becomes fully sainted in death, but instead came out as a series of shadowy glitches. Ligon opted to retain and exhibit The Death of Tom, the ruined film abstractly rendering the “serial nonevent of Tom’s death” (269). Again, Bradley illuminates how Ligon’s installation exceeds the representational; rather, it elucidates how the emergence of film as a medium is itself predicated on racial terror: “Blackness is anterior to the cinematic” (266). Thus, Bradley’s impetus in her text is thinking alongside Black art because it continually enunciates the constitutive tethering between the aesthetic and the anti-Black worlding that is intrinsic to its structure. In short, Bradley offers a sharp and tightly constructed treatise on seeing Western aesthetic discourse anew by foregrounding its Black(ened) supports.

Anteaesthetics is the inaugural text of the book series Inventions: Black Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics, edited by the scholar David Marriott—his recent work on Blackness and nonbeing is the second text in the series; this imprint is dedicated to preventing the absorption of Blackness into discourses of philosophy, politics, or aesthetics without radically questioning the epistemological foundations of those fields of knowledge. Marriott and Bradley’s shared raison d’être can perhaps be glimpsed most explicitly in the theoretical scaffolding Bradley deploys in this text. Bradley draws on and firmly situates her text within a rich Black philosophical tradition. In addition to the indelible influence of Fred Moten, Bradley generously cites peers working within the generative bounds of Afropessimism—be it Frank B. Wilderson III and Calvin L. Warren or art historians Huey Copeland and Sampada Aranke’s discussion of Afropessimist aesthetics. And yet, Anteaesthetics is a “philosophical performance” (23) that firmly grounds itself in the terra firma of Black feminist thought. For instance, Bradley’s concept of anteaesthetics is in taut dialogue with Hortense Spillers’s foundational and vital essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” In doing so, Bradley not only alludes to the prefix “ante” to signal a temporal marking (a “prior to” or “before”) but also to Spillers’s notion of the body that precedes the flesh and the spatial metaphor of the vestibular—or the waiting room of the anti-Black world. Spiller’s urtext is augmented in Bradley’s monograph by a robust cohort of like-minded Black feminist philosophers; these include, most prominently, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Joy James, Katherine McKittrick, Jessica Marie Johnson, Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya V. Hartman. However, in Anteaesthetics, Bradley also illuminates how visual artists, writers, and performers like Zora Neale Hurston, Dionne Brand, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry are similarly engaged in imagining and theorizing a new world order while distilling the contours of Blackness. In particular, Bradley’s attention to Hurston as an understudied philosopher is striking, an impulse shared by recently published texts in performance studies and aesthetics, most notably Alexandra T. Vazquez’s The Florida Room and Tina Post’s Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, while her framing of Nina Simone contributes to an increasing body of work on the musician by scholars such as Daphne A. Brooks, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Julius B. Fleming. Jr., and Danielle Heard. Bradley displays a dazzling and often vertiginous command of disparate academic fields in these pages, a methodological errancy that runs the gamut from queer and feminist theory, art history, and literary theory to cinema studies, affect theory, and Black diaspora studies. In doing so, she engages with, and often refashions, disciplinary conceptions of spectatorship, the audio-visual medium, objecthood, touch, mediality, and embodiment, to name a few. Anteaesthetics presents a trenchant and equally impressive grappling with the heavyweights of continental philosophy (such as Immanuel Kant, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, G. W. F. Hegel, and Michel Foucault), and its anti-Black origins.

Bradley wields a set of provocative and recurring concepts in Anteaesthetics to highlight the intertwined relationship between the aesthetic and an anti-Black worlding—such as “black aesthesis” to delimit that which emerges in “the cut between black existence and black nonbeing” (23). This term is crucial for the text since, as she notes, “black aesthesis is at once the condition of possibility for and radically incommensurate with aesthetic form—an emergence still unaccounted for in the scholarly canons of art history and continental philosophy” (31). Likewise, Bradley continually utilizes the botany term “dehiscence,” often used to denote the reopening of a surgical incision or wound, to speak to the violent rupturing of Black flesh that is a structuring possibility of modernity. Even here, she takes pains to distinguish her use of the term as derived from Brand’s theorization of chattel slavery as a “tear in the world” rather than Jacques Lacan or Merleau-Ponty’s respective employments of the term in a more psychoanalytic or phenomenological sense. Moreover, her use of spatial terms such as the “threshold” is instructive in its emphasis on the contours of this worlding and what it means, she suggests, to occupy the “negative underside” of this world order (17). Again, the Black feminine resurfaces as the “vestibule through which all forms must pass … Black femininity bears the modern world of forms and the form of the modern world” (65). One cannot help thinking of another spatial metaphor when reading this: Hartman’s discussion of the hallway as an overlooked site of Black assembly in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.³ In addition, Bradley conceives of others, such as the black residuum, anteformalism, and black mediality, that correspond to discussions within the chapters. And yet, stylistically, the most salient staging of the book’s argument is its form. Bradley argues, via Wilderson, that Anteaesthetics must reach a “higher level of abstraction” (29). Indeed, Bradley’s dense prose seems designed to partially obscure the visually apparent and demystify that which appears opaque. While Bradley’s recursive writing style, where sentences often fold and loop in on each other or stretch themselves out across elastic lengths to hammer home a point, may prove frustrating initially for some readers, this language seems to be a purposeful decision on Bradley’s part: we perceive glimpses of the larger whole and the structural supports underneath it. The reader is forced to wander through its enigmatic structure, piecing together a worldview. Again, the text itself is a durational performance, suggestive of the sustained labor Blackness must enact within the racial regime of the aesthetic. This textual elusiveness may be perceived as a refusal, not unlike Nina Simone’s in the scene of performance: Anteaesthetics situates itself within the bounds of the form while simultaneously being unwilling to accede to its understood terms of operation fully. As a result, Bradley defamiliarizes Western aesthetic discourse while not fully revealing the mystery of the Black artist.

Bradley’s Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthetics and the Critique of Form is a monumental text, as theoretically agile as it is utterly majestic in its scope. It shakes the foundations of aesthetics while also challenging the fields of art history and cinema studies to reckon with its unseemly alliance with antiblackness. Moreover, Anteaesthetics persuasively showcases how dominant idealizations of the aesthetic as benevolent and universally applicable are inherently flawed. Instead, a very different and dissenting view emerges in Bradley’s text, one in which the worlding apparatus of the aesthetic both requires and negates Blackness as a necessary spoke in its sleek machinery. She aims to reveal the cartography of the modern world, one where Blackness has been operationalized to function as its “absent center” (105). Bradley suggests that we must turn to the experimentation deployed in the realm of the Black aesthetic, not because it will offer any recourse to this fundamental impossibility, but rather because it pushes us to sit with its lasting effects.

Uri McMillan is an associate professor of English and gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (2015, NYU Press).