BOOK DATA: Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. Palo Alto, CA: Standford University Press, 2023. $130 cloth; $30 paper. 406 pages.

Before the world, there was blackness and its unthinkable, unspeakable abyss. Blackness, in this sense, refers to the primordial disorder that this world etches in the flesh of black peoples. It refers to the excess conceptual and material fecundity that Western ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology are unwilling to countenance and unable to endure, even as these systems need this fecundity to affirm their relative stability and renew their world-making projects. As this excess, blackness cannot be represented within these systems, even as it subtends their ongoing reproduction of themselves. It is, in this way, a formlessness that subtends form, an absence that, coming prior to Western aesthetics, both de- and reconstructs their conditions of possibility.

This is the core argument of Rizvana Bradley’s Anteaesthetics:...

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