Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

In its introduction, Rizvana Bradley’s Anteaesthetics declares that the book ‘aims to think with the aesthesis of a black existence that is before the metaphysics of the antiblack world and the representational regime which endeavours to secure and sustain this metaphysics’ (p. 9) What initially reads like a simple thesis statement is in fact a claim on an intellectual genealogy; it is a compressed description of how this book’s ‘theoretical project’ is related to the body of scholarship that came before it, what the book itself seeks to achieve in its current form, and what kind of subsequent iterations can emerge after its methods and approaches have been, to use Bradley’s term, ‘inaugurate[d]’ (p. 9). Anteaesthetics then is partly a study of race and representation. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, a snapshot of where Black studies finds itself at this historical juncture and an indication of where we might go from here.