ISBN:
9781478002581
Language:
English
Pages:
1 online resource (208 pages)
,
9 illustrations, incl 8 in color
Series Statement:
Theory Q
DDC:
305.896/073
Keywords:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
;
Aesthetics, Black
;
Blacks Race identity
;
Blacks Study and teaching
;
Slavery History
;
Study and teaching
Abstract:
It 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 toward the 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 Us the 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
Note:
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Sep 2020)
,
In English
DOI:
10.1515/9781478002581
URL:
Volltext
(URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
URL:
Volltext
(URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
