Since the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s when Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois were building a discourse on Black artistic production, scholars across disciplines have grappled with defining Black art beyond the commonsense that it is art made by people who happen to be Black. Or outside the terms that hail it for its presumed “authentic testimony, resistive politics, or reparative potential” (1): What is it? What does it do? What does it look like? What is its position within the aesthetic regime?  The answers to these and related questions are wide-ranging and not definitive, as evidenced by the amount of scholarship dedicated to the discourse. Notable studies published since the Black Arts Movement include Addison Gayle’s edited volume, The Black Aesthetic (New York: Doubleday, 1972), Clyde R. Taylor’s The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), Paul C. Taylor’s Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), Darby English’s How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: The Mit Press, 2007), and Tina Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021). All these scholars are likely to agree on the assertion that, in Clyde Taylor’s words, “the aesthetic [ . . . ] is an ethnic gaze, and a class-bounded one at that” (The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature, Indiana University Press, 1998, 15). Rizvana Bradley, assistant professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, the latest contribution to this body of scholarship, concurs with Taylor’s assessment. She states, following David Lloyd and Sylvia Wynter, that “the aesthetic is above all a ‘racial regime of representation’” (9).

For Bradley, the Western aesthetic is too often qualified by a presumed objective disinterest and a removal from any kind of politics. But, as Bradley argues, it has always been intimately entangled with ideological racism. The writings of Kant and Hume demonstrate an early common sense formed around an anti-Black racial consciousness that pervaded the European Enlightenment. For example, in Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), one can find an infamous passage describing a Black carpenter’s impertinence during an exchange with a white minister. The philosopher’s response to the father’s anecdote was, “this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid” (Kant quoted in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997). Kant’s slippage between a “pure” philosopher unsullied by the quotidian preoccupations of the world and an anthropologist fixated on race is characteristic of the period. But it also points to the unsettling fact that the development of modernity and the modern subject is inextricable from race theory. Equally indispensable to shoring up the aesthetic regime is race, more pointedly, Blackness. Yet, despite its centrality to the aesthetic, Blackness, Bradley argues, “has no place within the ontology of the antiblack world and cannot be represented within modernity’s aesthetic regime” (9). Hers is not a critique, per se, of this regime. Rather she wants to trouble the capacity of phenomenology and ontology to adequately, if at all, account for Black existence. In her theoretical framework, Blackness, such that it is, is interdicted from ontology and the aesthetic is essential to this interdiction. And Blackness is “vestibular to and the terminus of the racial regime of aesthetics” (16). Invoking Hortense Spillers, who in her seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” asserts “before the ‘body ‘there is the ‘flesh,’” Bradley appends the prefix ante- to the word aesthetic to convey this nexus of vestibularity and subjectification. Anteaesthetic describes the inability for Blackness to be represented within modernity’s aesthetic regime while simultaneously it is called to appear before and labor for it.

In five well-crafted body chapters, Bradley rethinks the aesthetic by taking up the work of Black artists working in a range of media and vigorously engaging in what she identifies as their “inhabitations and experimentations” (2) that emerge “before” the anti-Black world as its condition of possibility. Chapter one, “Toward a Theory of Anteaesthetics,” provides the critical theoretical scaffolding upon which she stages her philosophical intervention. Her departure point is Arthur Jafa’s experimental film Dreams Are Colder Than Death (2014), a meditation on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have Dream” speech and what it means to be Black in America. Thinking with Jafa’s documentary/essay, Bradley argues “blackness is no more available to phenomenology than to ontology” (45). She focuses on the sequence featuring Spillers, whose own meditation in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” on the relationship between the “captive body” and “high crimes against the flesh,” Bradley argues, constitutes a “philosophical performance” as defined by Sarah Jane Cervenak (55). For the author, it is a performance that makes plain the immediacy between Black flesh and the brutality to which it is always subjected. She turns to Black feminist thought to further mine “the entanglements of subjection and subversion that are given in the racially gendered (re)productions of slavery and its afterlives” (64) which are constitutive of the anteaesthetic practices at the center of Bradley’s inquiry. At the end of this chapter, she interrogates the modern body as defined by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Where Nancy considers the body “the exclusive invention of Western civilization” as well as “Europe’s unique inheritance” (75), Bradley argues the modern body is a racial apparatus before which the racially gendered reproductivity of Blackness is made to appear.

Chapter two, “The Corporeal Division of the World, or Aesthetic Ruination” and chapter three, “Before the Nude, or Exorbitant Figuration,” continue the author’s investigation into the body as an aesthetic form that pivots on what Bradley terms “the racial division of corporeality for which Blackness is the absent center” (105). She is specifically interested in the conjuncture of aesthetics, Blackness, and the racial division of corporeality that characterizes the nineteenth century. In this regard, chapter two begins with a considered exegesis of Gericault’s Study for the Signaling Black or African Signaling (1819) and The Raft of the Medusa (1819). The painting is acclaimed as the most ambitious work of art by one of the most influential early Romanticist painters who gave prominence to the Black figure in his oeuvre to express his advocacy for the abolition of slavery. Raft of the Medusa’s signaling Black figure has been the subject of much discourse. Significantly, Bradley engages with the art historical scholarship of Thomas Crow, whose reading of the signaling Black through the Belvedere Torso (mid-first century BCE) exposes the paradox wherein the figure’s inclusion in the universalist project of the nineteenth century depends on its continuing degradation (111). With a compelling turn of thought, the reader’s attention is redirected to the haptic as it relates to Gericault’s magnum opus. Reading against Crow’s interpretation of the Europeans’ arms outstretched to the signaling African—Crow asserts that these outstretched arms signal benevolence—Bradley, again, takes up the work of Spillers whose theory on touch registers its contradictory nature: on one hand, she avers, touch can be restorative, but on the other, it can be harmful, demeaning. Having demonstrated one-way touch contributes to the reproduction of Blackness as the absent center of the racially gendered division of corporeality, the author makes what may seem like a leap to nineteenth-century caricature, specifically Louis François Charon’s Les Curieux en extase, ou les cordons de souliers (ca. 1814–15), one of many caricatures of Saartjie Baartman whose racist misnomer was the Hottentot Venus. However, in her parsing of the racially gendered divisions vis-à-vis touch, Bradley manages to articulate the works’ shared “aesthetic unconscious that had thoroughly internalized the racially gendered constitution of the corporeal division of the world and its disjunctive orders of touch” (136). Baartman as the paradigmatic figure for Black feminine embodiment is critical to Anteaesthetics’ underlying argument about the centrality of the Black feminine to the reproduction of Blackness as the threshold of the anti-Black world. Using Mickalene Thomas’s technically innovative, multimedia installation Me As Muse (2016) as a starting point, chapter three further mines Saarjtie Baartman’s central role in the aesthetic regime.

The work of artists Glenn Ligon and Sondra Perry serves as case studies for chapters four and five. Best known for his text-based paintings that draw on the writings of such figures as James Baldwin, Richard Pryor, and Jesse Jackson, Ligon rose to prominence in the 1990s for producing conceptualist work across media that interrogates race, sexuality, and American history. In the first half of chapter four, “The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains,” Bradley, having first introduced the term “black residuum” in chapter three, examines the remainders of flesh, its “obdurate materiality” (165), using Ligon’s appropriations of texts by Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston. Her interest in the artist’s text-based engagements with Ellison and Hurston is sustained, in part, by Ligon’s mindfulness of the vestibular (221). She also identifies in his work “an anteaesthetic critique of the ontological and phenomenological grounds and reproduction of both medium and media as such" (227). This is made especially clear in the second half of chapter four through the author’s analysis of Ligon’s 2008 video installation The Death of Tom, which cites Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent film based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 sentimentalist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Bradley argues, Ligon’s video installation does not just lay bare American cinema’s entanglements with racism but also exposes Black mediality as foundational to the advent of the form. In the final chapter, Bradley problematizes worlding practices and the theoretical proposition of worlding because of the condition of Black anteriority. Through careful, extended readings of Sondra Perry’s digital art installations, Typhoon coming on (2018) and Flesh Wall (2016–20), the chapter rejects even the possibility of otherworlding. Instead, the author advances the concept of unworlding, emphasizing the importance of its “ulterior force [ . . . ] as a racially gendered emergence or submergence that is anterior and antithetical to worlding” (49).

Sitting at the intersection of continental philosophy, art history, film and media studies, and Black studies, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form leverages the theories and methods of these disciplines to wage a sustained and complex interrogation of modernity’s aesthetic regime, disciplinarity itself, and the world as form itself. From Merleau-Ponty to Hortense Spillers, the range of Rizvana Bradley’s theoretical interlocutors is evidence of the depth and breadth of her scholarship. While her liberal use of jargon at times overtakes the text, her signposting and practice of reiterating her essential points recover the argumentative throughline. That being said, Anteaesthetics would appeal primarily to those thoroughly immersed in the discursive formations from which Bradley draws. Nevertheless, any reader will find this an urgent and much-needed intervention.