Description
Book SynopsisAliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman examines how contemporary avant-garde black art and writing by Wangechi Mutu, Marci Blackman, Alexandria Smith, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Harmony Holiday, and Essex Hemphill use experimental methods to represent and imaginatively remediate racial harm.
Trade Review“In
Millennial Style, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman makes a forceful argument for specifying different modes of black experimentation and connecting them explicitly to modes not only of survival but of refusals of various forms of domination. Beautifully written and intellectually engaging,
Millennial Style’s important sustained analyses of black experimental cultural production and vital insights make a major contribution.” -- Amber Jamilla Musser, author of * Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined *
“Without a doubt Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is one of the most important scholars in black cultural theory, gender studies, and sexuality studies. With this new work, she focuses on the refusal of realism in contemporary black art practices to theorize blackness and being among disaster politics, environmental devastation, state killings of black people, perpetual poverty in the post-Civil Rights era.
Millennial Style is a striking, beautifully written, and insistent text that needs to be read by the broadest audience possible.” -- Roderick A. Ferguson, author of * One-Dimensional Queer *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Toward a Radical Theory of the Black Avant-Garde 1
1. Black Grotesquerie 25
2. Hollowed Blackness 49
3. Black Cacophony 77
4. The Black Ecstatic 105
Epilogue. On Sustenance and Suture 131
Acknowledgments 137
Notes 141
Bibliography 157
Index 165
