Workshop 'The Critique of Form: Anteaesthetics and Black Aesthesis'

On 19 April, from 14:00 to 17:00, Dr Rizvana Bradley (University of California, Berkeley) will provide a workshop titled 'The Critique of Form: Anteaesthetics and Black Aesthesis'. This event is co-organized by Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities, Critical Pathways and the Netherlands Research School for Gender Studies (NOG). The workshop is followed by a lecture on the 22 of April. 

Both events build on Rizvana Bradley’s new book Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, October 2023). The book engages practices of aesthetics – broadly across painting, cinema, video installations and digital art – with the question which aesthetic forms are foundational to modernity and how these are deconstructed and challenged especially in Black art. 

In conjunction, the workshop and the lecture will ask how art can demonstrate foundationally modern aesthetic forms and deconstruct them to move toward other imaginations of planetary cohabitation. As these events propose, unworking the grammars of modern onto-epistemology requires not only the arts and culture, which contribute to shifting the frameworks within which sustainability and planetary cohabitation can be approached, but also the collaboration of various research angles and disciplines. We cordially invite you to join us for both or for either of these upcoming events. Detailed information can be found here. 

Workshop

The workshop strives to offer ample space for discussion to explicitly reflect on how the question of anteaesthetics relates to our own research projects. How does anteaesthetics address challenges in your work? What can we learn from such a conceptual framework in view of our own projects?

Preparation and participation

This workshop brings together interested faculty, PhD students and advanced RMA students. For a lively discussion during the workshop, all participants are asked to prepare the assigned readings in advance. The texts will be made available upon registration. Research Master students interested in obtaining ECTS (via Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG)) can contact the organizers (email info@terracritica.net).

Dr Rizvana Bradley

Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, was published in 2023 by Stanford University Press. Her scholarly work has been published in Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Film Quarterly, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, TDR: The Drama Review, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her art criticism has also been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett.