Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture

In 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 black mortal and material resources against the injuries of social death, as the fashioning of relational ethics, and as exuberant black world-building in ruinous times.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. 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

About the Author :
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Brown University and the author of Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race, also published by Duke University Press.

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) "This groundbreaking text delves into the intricate connections among political terror, social abjection, and aesthetic abstraction within contemporary African diasporic cultural expression. Abdur-Rahman’s endeavor represents a profound engagement with black communities’ artistic and world-making practices." - Toni Hidayat (African Identities) "A tremendous offering to Black studies and cultural criticism has just entered the conversation. . . . Abdur-Rahman’s critical intervention ought to mobilize critics of art and culture to consider the political utility of Black abstraction and related experimental forms while refusing narratives of progress that erase the immense suffering of a modern world created by a consistently shapeshifting anti-Blackness." - Alexandra M. Thomas (Hyperallergic)