In Between Shadows and Noise Amber Jamilla Musser theorizes sensation as a Black feminist method for aesthetic interpretation and criticism that uses the knowledges held by the body to access the unrepresentable. Thinking through Blackness, empire, and colonialism, Musser examines artworks ranging from Ming Smith’s Flamingo Fandango, Jordan Peele’s Us, and Katherine Dunham’s Shango to Samita Sinha’s This ember state, Titus Kaphar’s A Pillow for Fragile Fictions, and Teresita Fernández’s Puerto Rico (Burned) 6. She engages with these works from an embodied situatedness to grapple with the questions and sensations of racialization and difference that the works produce. Throughout, Musser rethinks how we consider the relationships between race, representation, and politics by dwelling in those spaces and concepts that elude Western norms of representation, objectivity, and logic. In so doing, she explores ways of being and knowing that exceed overdetermined parameters while offering a blueprint for sensing, imagining, and living otherwise.

Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance and Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Body Work  1
1. Us, the Uncanny, and the Threat of Black Femininity  21
2. Inside Out: Shango and Spectacles of the Spirit  42
3. Noise and the Body-Place: This ember state and the Critical Encounter  59
4. On the Brink: Approximation, Difference, and Ongoing Storms  76
5. Tamarind, Metabolism, and Rest: Making Racialized Labor Visible  94
Conclusion. Inflammation: Notes from the Front  112
Notes  131
Bibliography  157
Index  175