STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, OCTOBER 2023
INVENTIONS: BLACK PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AESTHETICS
DAVID MARRIOTT, SERIES EDITOR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION (MLA) PRIZE FOR A FIRST BOOK • NAMED ONE OF THE TOP BOOKS OF 2023 BY FRIEZE
"Anteaesthetics offers a new interpretive framework for the philosophical interventions black art undertakes, stressing black art's negative power."—The Yale Review
In Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, 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.
Anteaesthetics is a recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.