Janiva Ellis in conversation with Rizvana Bradley, author of Anteaesthetics (2023)

Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, (Stanford University Press 2023), was named a Best Book of the Year by Frieze Magazine, and shortlisted for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book. 

Anteaesthetics moves across multiple artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—in order to inaugurate a new method for interpretation, an ante-formalism, which demonstrates black art’s recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of the academic journals, October, and Camera Obscura. Her scholarly articles appear in Diacritics, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Discourse, The Drama Review, as well as The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett. Bradley's work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.