None Like Us

"None Like Us begins as an intervention into black studies. To accomplish this, it turns to works of art and invention by people whom history has needed to be black. But as it unravels any claim to genre, discipline, field, identity, or audience, the book issues a broad invitation to the reader to see black studies and queer theory, black and queer life, not as identities to inhabit, but as critical perspectives on history and on a present tense that has been so scarred by various melodramas of the self-of its defense, self-possession, and propriety-that have played themselves out on both sides of anti-racist critique." -- Kris Cohen * Public Books * "Compelling. . . Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- C. E. Bender * Choice * "Best's ambitious and well-reasoned thesis confronts the challenge of thinking like a work of art but also of thinking the work of art as an object of critical studies, particularly in Black Studies. ... Responsibly argued and impressively confessional, Best offers thoughtful ways of reconfiguring Black Studies." -- Alice Mikail Craven * Modern Language Review * "... None Like Us is distinctive as it aims to break with the well-established and perhaps taken-for-granted tenet in the black political present and contemporary black criticism, of a communitarian, shared slave past.... With its themes of identity and belonging, history and the archive, along with a range of visual and literary works, None Like Us would appeal to the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies sociologists; historians, anthropologists, in addition to scholars with an interest in art and visual culture." -- Karen Wilkes * Visual Studies * "None Like Us is attempting to produce a version of Blackness that does not need to work through the white gaze and, instead, understands freedom on its own terms. . . . Best prioritizes the present, the surface, and the pleasures of engaging on one's own terms." -- Amber Jamilla Musser * Cultural Critique * "Best picks apart the tropes that are often treated as foregone conclusions: that the heirs of a people made chattel would incur and even embrace the terms foisted upon them, that the first-person plural of Black studies is monolithic." -- Lauren Michele Jackson * The New Yorker *

Stephen Best is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession.

Introduction. Unfit for History 1 Part I. On Thinking Like a Work of Art 1. My Beautiful Elimination 29 2. On Failing to Make the Past Present 63 Part II. A History of Discontinuity Interstice. A Gossamer Writing 83 3. The History of People Who Did Not Exist 91 4. Rumor in the Archive 107 Acknowledgments 133 Notes 135 Bibliography 173 Index 193