Description
Book SynopsisIt passes for an unassailable truth that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present. In None Like Us Stephen Best reappraises what he calls melancholy historicism-a kind of crime scene investigation in which the forensic imagination is directed towardthe recovery of a we at the point of our violent origin. Best argues that there is and can be no we following from such a time and place, that black identity is constituted in and through negation, taking inspiration from David Walker's prayer that none like us may ever live again until time shall be no more. Best draws out the connections between a sense of impossible black sociality and strains of negativity that have operated under the sign of queer. In None Like Usthe art of El Anatsui and Mark Bradford, the literature of Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks, even rumors in the archive, evidence an apocalyptic aesthetics, or self-eclipse, which opens the circuits between past and present and thus charts a queer future for black study.
Trade Review"
None Like Us begins as an intervention into black studies. To accomplish this, it turns to works of art and invention by people whom history has needed to be black. But as it unravels any claim to genre, discipline, field, identity, or audience, the book issues a broad invitation to the reader to see black studies and queer theory, black and queer life, not as identities to inhabit, but as critical perspectives on history and on a present tense that has been so scarred by various melodramas of the self—of its defense, self-possession, and propriety—that have played themselves out on both sides of anti-racist critique." -- Kris Cohen * Public Books *
"Compelling. . . Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- C. E. Bender * Choice *
"Best’s ambitious and well-reasoned thesis confronts the challenge of thinking like a work of art but also of thinking the work of art as an object of critical studies, particularly in Black Studies. ... Responsibly argued and impressively confessional, Best offers thoughtful ways of reconfiguring Black Studies." -- Alice Mikail Craven * Modern Language Review *
“…
None Like Us is distinctive as it aims to break with the well-established and perhaps taken-for-granted tenet in the black political present and contemporary black criticism, of a communitarian, shared slave past…. With its themes of identity and belonging, history and the archive, along with a range of visual and literary works,
None Like Us would appeal to the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies sociologists; historians, anthropologists, in addition to scholars with an interest in art and visual culture.” -- Karen Wilkes * Visual Studies *
“
None Like Us is attempting to produce a version of Blackness that does not need to work through the white gaze and, instead, understands freedom on its own terms. . . . Best prioritizes the present, the surface, and the pleasures of engaging on one’s own terms.” -- Amber Jamilla Musser * Cultural Critique *
"Best picks apart the tropes that are often treated as foregone conclusions: that the heirs of a people made chattel would incur and even embrace the terms foisted upon them, that the first-person plural of Black studies is monolithic." -- Lauren Michele Jackson * The New Yorker *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Unfit for History 1
Part I. On Thinking Like a Work of Art
1. My Beautiful Elimination 29
2. On Failing to Make the Past Present 63
Part II. A History of Discontinuity
Interstice. A Gossamer Writing 83
3. The History of People Who Did Not Exist 91
4. Rumor in the Archive 107
Acknowledgments 133
Notes 135
Bibliography 173
Index 193
