Description
Book SynopsisIn
Millennial Style, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman looks at recent experiments in black expressive culture that begin in the place of ruin. By ruin, Abdur-Rahman means the political terror and social abjection that constitute the ongoing peril of black lives. Whereas earlier black writers and artists have employed realist modes of expression to represent racial harm and to imaginatively remediate it, the black avant-garde of today displays more experimental methods. Abdur-Rahman outlines four widely employed modes in contemporary African diasporic cultural production: Black Grotesquerie, Hollowed Blackness, Black Cacophony, and the Black Ecstatic. Mobilizing black feminist and black radical thought, she considers work by such cultural practitioners as Wangechi Mutu, Marci Blackman, Alexandria Smith, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Harmony Holiday, and Essex Hemphill. Writerly and experimental,
Millennial Style theorizes contemporary black art as the holding (or hoarding) of bl
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
