Anteaesthetics

Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Anteaesthetics offers a new interpretive framework for the philosophical interventions black art undertakes, stressing black art's negative power."—The Yale Review "Anteaesthetics is the study of black aesthetics I didn't know I sorely needed. Bradley offers a razor-sharp and sumptuous meditation on black aesthetics in, through, and vestibular to an anti-black world."—Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Brown University "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 "An event in contemporary aesthetic theory."—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 "Anteaesthetics registers an insurmountable, 'paradoxical emergence' that works differently from the register of more prevalent discourses on fugitivity in critical Black Studies."—Theory, Culture, & Society

• Introduction1. Toward a Theory of Anteaesthetics2. The Corporeal Division of the World, or Aesthetic Ruination3. Before the Nude, or Exorbitant Figuration4. The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains5. Unworlding, or the Involution of Value