Anteaesthetics

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In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley posits that blackness eludes representation within modernity's aesthetic regime while remaining foundational to all representation. She challenges the notion that the aesthetic is free from the antiblack terror lurking outside its boundaries, asserting that blackness cannot find a home within the aesthetic but exists as its threshold and aporia. The work interrogates the phenomenological and ontological assumptions that inform the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Traversing diverse histories and geographies, and various artistic mediums—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art by Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry—Bradley introduces a new interpretative method: ante-formalism. This approach reveals how black art recursively deconstructs the aesthetic forms central to modernity. By foregrounding the negativity inherent in black art, Bradley illustrates how these artists expose the racialized dimensions of body, form, and medium, even questioning the very form of the world. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, she invites us to engage philosophically with black art and its inherent philosophical innovations.