Review: Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, by Rizvana Bradley

Book Review| June 01 2024 Review: Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, by Rizvana Bradley Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, by Rizvana Bradley Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield ASHLEIGH CASSEMERE-STANFIELD is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Colgate University. They work at the intersection of black studies, video-game studies, queer theory, media theory, and new materialism. Their research explores how the abrasive generativity of AI rhymes with a similar generativity within blackness and queerness. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar 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. Film Quarterly (2024) 77 (4): 105–106. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2024.77.4.105 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield; Review: Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, by Rizvana Bradley. Film Quarterly 1 June 2024; 77 (4): 105–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2024.77.4.105 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search 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:... You do not currently have access to this content.