None Like Us

Reviewed by: None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life by Stephen Best Stephen Knadler Stephen Best. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2018. 208 pp. $24.95. How and why do we read the archive? What does our engagement with a black past look like and to what extent is it driven by agendas—ethical, [End Page 158] political, and professional—that have not always been fully acknowledged and that need to be better understood? In None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, Stephen Best kindles another heated conversation—this time, about "What was African American literary criticism"—by extending some of the claims of his earlier revisionist work with Sharon Marcus on "surface reading" to argue for a queer aesthetic orientation to the archive. Some trajectories of Best's criticism of African American recovery work will sound familiar to readers of Michelle Wright, Saidiya Hartman, or Katherine McKittrick: the questioning of methodologies that "find" (i.e., project) fantasies about desired black identities and political consciousness onto the past; the impossibility of witnessing lives lost in the mathematics of the slave ledger; and the critique of historical presentism, or the flattening of linguistic indeterminacy, to name a few. But these previous archival self-doubts have done little to dampen a prevailing faith in the efficacy and redemptive urgency of a politically engaged African American criticism: we want to believe that the critical deep reading we do makes a difference in the world, even if we have become more hesitant about, and suspicious of, this cultural work's forwarding of freedom struggles. In None Like Us, however, Best wants us to believe, feel, and find pleasure within the archive differently. Calling for an aesthetic turn in African American literary criticism similar to recent trends in queer studies, Best reminds us that the heroic struggles to pass on and reproduce the past for a supposedly progressive black future can also be repressive. What is repressive is not so much what is said (whether sexist, heteronormative, or ableist). What is oppressive is how we "do" the archive, the very process of wanting to offer deep ideologically driven readings in order to translate interesting new finds into emancipatory patterns and paradigms for black liberation. It is just this desire for salvific representational claims to point toward new black subjectivities, however inclusive, that Best reminds us can hurt, using his own personal story as a black gay man, and will always fail to be liberating for the "not like us." The harm in this self-righteous criticism comes in the archivist's inherent wish to "capture" (all puns intended) the always unfolding idiosyncratic, weird, insane, and various varieties of black personhood in a unifying historical past and present. In contrast, Best traces out a queer aesthetic reading of the archive grounded on failure. This alternative aesthetic reading is not just more modest, but self-shattering. In Best's reconceptualization of archival pleasures, the critic is a creative artist of speculative fictions, rather than a heroic racial protestor. These artist-critics set up their own failure by creating temporarily beautiful visions of the past, but then deconstructing them by recognizing what exceeds and complicates these longed-for histories and identities: For Best, an aesthetic relation to the archive finds freedom in the critic's own self-invention, and then subsequent de-realization: a de-realization that allows for new modes, new relations, new possibilities of becoming and unbecoming that preempt constraining concepts of "black" authenticity, legitimacy, or solidarity from being passed on. In his reading of the Ghanaian found-object sculptor El Anatsui, Best identifies an emblematic figure for this queer aesthetic relation to the archive. In sculptures such as "Fading Cloth," Anatsui weaves together aluminum bottle caps with copper wire to give the initial impression of gold brocade, but upon further inspection, this glittering tapestry reveals itself to be only trash. Thus, Anatsui becomes a stand-in for the archival critic, who, like the artist, makes something temporarily beautiful—and worth viewers/readers' investment—but then builds in the form's dissolution. Given that Best questions the archivist's ethical and political imperative to recover and redeem the past, his second

Aesthetics · Art · Conversation · Criticism · Epistemology · Indeterminacy (philosophy) · Literary criticism · Literary theory · Literature · New Criticism · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

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