None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Theory Q)

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.

• Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (Sexual Cultures Book 14)
• Queer Times, Black Futures (Sexual Cultures Book 30)
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)
• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation
• Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being)
• Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (Sexual Cultures Book 51)
• The Hundreds
• Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle