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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Jonathan PughORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Taking aesthetics as a racial regime of modernity, the focus of Bradley’s Anteaesthetics is experiments in Black art which are not ‘worlding but an illimitable descent made to come before the world’. With a powerful introduction reflecting upon Nina Simone at the Montreal Jazz festival, and chapters which take us through 19th-century paintings, cinema, texts, video installations, and digital art, Anteaesthetics forces us to encounter the horror, beauty, and racially gendered dimensions of a negative inhabitation substantiated through the absolutely dispossessive field of worlding aesthetic refrains. Working against the grain of debate, aesthetics is not generatively enrolled for the modern subject possessed of ontological security to productively world itself in new ways. Rather, Anteaesthetics enables us to critically interrogate how investing in aesthetics requires working with the negative, taking an uncompromising stance towards aesthetics as a constitutive force of the ongoing violent legacies of modernity.
Author(s): Pugh J
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Theory, Culture & Society
Year: 2024
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 25/11/2024
Acceptance date: 25/11/2024
Date deposited: 25/11/2024
ISSN (print): 0263-2764
ISSN (electronic): 1460-3616
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241296801
DOI: 10.1177/02632764241296801
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