Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

Title: Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

Author: Rizvana Bradley

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Publication Year: 2023

ISBN:  9781503637139

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.