Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture (Duke University Press, 2024) astutely valorizes the speculative power and experimentation practices of black feminist and queer writers and artists who have produced works since the 1980s, or the era we demarcate as the “millennial generation.” In particular, Abdur-Rahman effectively “[reckons] with black art- and world-making practices that take seriously the denial of progressive change or futural improvement for black subjects living in and after ruin (of our times, of our lives)” (5). While Abdur-Rahman is less concerned with the temporal boundaries between the “millennial era,” the periods before the millennial era, and our contemporary moment, the works she theorizes from nonetheless have either all been published from the millennial era or created by millennial-aged black writers and artists themselves.
Abdur-Rahman’s monograph is situated within a larger genealogy of scholars who have (1) unearthed how contemporary black writers and artists engage in a politics of experiment and (2) practiced this experimentation via the process of aesthetic abstraction. Millennial Style seeks to understand this “impulse toward the experimental, the avant-garde, and the abstract” (5), which Margo Natalie Crawford has called the “Black Experimental Impulse,” a literary phenomenon that emerged from the Black Arts Movement (BAM). Building from Darby English’s notion of black representational space, Crawford defines this black experimental impulse when BAM creatives desired to re-present blackness in “powerfully opaque” abstract modes (105). On abstraction, Abdur-Rahman also cites Phillip Brian Harper, who notes that black abstraction “emphasizes its own distance from reality by calling attention to its constructed or artificial character rather than striving to dissemble that constructedness in the service of the maximum verisimilitude so highly prized within the realist framework just sketched” (9). Millennial Style thus highlights how these black diasporic creatives skillfully employ abstraction to literally experiment with reality, making meaning of, conjuring being within, and disrupting teleologies about disastrous, (post)colonized, or postindustrial life.
In Millennial Style, Abdur-Rahman posits four different categories that she argues describe “the most predominant and pervasive aesthetic modes across literature, visual art, and film in contemporary black cultural production of high experiment” (7). These categories are the Black Grotesquerie, Hollowed Blackness, Black Cacophony, and the Black Ecstatic. The Black Grotesquerie arises within texts that contextualize black life and being within ruin and catastrophe (26). Hollowed Blackness (or Black Hollows) considers how black creators “[reconfigure] the spatial terrain of Black freedom” by reimagining, inverting, or challenging hegemonic notions of place and anti-black captivity (51). Black Cacophony analyzes various forms of “loud, interruptive” black sound (e.g., the scream, wail, or blabber) to carefully highlight “the insufficiency and the superfluity of language for capturing exploited or discarded black life” (81). Lastly, the Black Ecstatic centers the affective ways black queer(ed) subjects illustrate joys, possibilities, and livelihoods in the catastrophic present, challenging the teleological temporality between the romanticized, heroic Civil Rights past and the fallacious promises of a progressive, free, and post-racial future (107).
All four frameworks theorized by Abdur-Rahman surely provide necessary analytical and speculative tools for scholars across a multitude of humanistic methods and disciplines—most clearly within literature, history, and art history—to consider the textures of contemporary (and historic) black life more thoroughly. Abdur-Rahman’s rendering of Hollowed Blackness and the Black Ecstatic in particular not only has utility in reading archives, art, or literature but also in the social sciences. Abdur-Rahman’s theories also provide social scientists (e.g., ethnographers) of black life with critical tools, particularly those who seek to experiment with more ethical, speculative methodologies in their own fieldwork.
To reiterate, contemporary black writers and artists who employ Hollowed Blackness “[navigate] hideaway geographies and opaque enclosures to reveal the stifled affective range of bare life and the emotive drains of barely living” (51). Understanding place for black female subjects, Abdur-Rahman conjures Hollowed Blackness by building from work by geographer Katherine McKittrick and cultural critic Hortense Spillers. Abdur-Rahman’s primary excavation of Hollowed Blackness is through racialized, gendered characters like Cora, the enslaved girl protagonist in Colson Whitehead’s post-neo-slave novel The Underground Railroad (2016). Building (again) from Crawford, Abdur-Rahman states that the post-neo-slave novel—like The Underground Railroad—does not elicit clear political strategy like the neo-slave novel, a genre of literature that blossomed immediately after the Civil Rights era to “make slavery familiar—intimate, even—to contemporary audiences” (61). Rather, the post-neo-slavery narrative rids expectations of familiarity, [defying] historicity, generic constraint, epistemic certainty, and readerly comprehension (65). Here, Hollowed Blackness provides a more textured register to understand black freedom and marronage within spatial limits—figuratively and politically. Collapsing the distinction between space-time, Whitehead’s usage of Hollowed Blackness reminds us of the horrors of slavery’s afterlife, “unsettl[ing] political pleas and proscriptive paradigms for Black racial uplift in any era, implying ultimately that—as is the case for Cora—freedom is neither an achievable nor preservable state for the enslaved captives of the New World or for their descendants” (65).
As Whitehead’s use of Hollowed Blackness, for instance, represents “a significant departure from the modes and objectives of realist narratives that portray black life-worlds, the novel [still] retains the secrecy, the privacy, of black interiors” (67). It is through this protective, speculative register of Hollowed Blackness that its value emerges in the slippery field of urban ethnography in the West. Too often, we have read ethnographies that depict issues of crime, gang life, and injury within urban black communities. When we read them, as Savannah Shange notes, we leave with an unnecessarily detailed understanding of people’s interior lives, and many ethnographers’ interlocutors are not afforded opacity or the ability to govern their own narrative (119-122). More specifically, black subjects with marginalized gender and sexual subjectivities are too often located at a narratological binary in the genre of ethnography—placeholders for non-rigorous analyses or completely absent from the stories at large. If we consider the injurious, urban black neighborhood, school, or community—vulnerable to carceral and university surveillance alike—as indicative of slavery’s afterlife, then it should alarm audiences to consistently read living black people’s voice and opacity written out of the traditional urban ethnographic text. Abdur-Rahman’s Hollowed Blackness, thus, offers an ethical, methodological guidebook for urban ethnographers (at all stages in the research process—from field observations to writing to analysis) to prioritize safety and care for black life. If we can more thoroughly read (urban) black life as spatially agentic, we can speculate on how black gendered and sexualized peoples currently make sense, find pleasure, or refuse the conditions of the violent places they navigate and the ethnographers’ need to know and expose (and subsequently reveal) black interiority.
Again, Abdur-Rahman’s framework of the black Ecstatic is a “post–civil rights expressive practice, eschew[ing] the heroism of black pasts and the promise of liberated black futures in order to register and revere rapturous joy in the broken-down present” (108). In her chapter on the Black Ecstatic, Abdur-Rahman analyzes Moonlight (2016), directed by filmmaker Barry Jenkins, and the poem “Heavy Breathing” from poet Essex Hemphill’s book Ceremonies (1992). Inspired by scholarship on queer temporality and affect—including work by Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lauren Berlant—the notion of the Black Ecstatic showcases the black cultural turn toward the imperfect now because “in the twenty-first century, we who are black find ourselves simultaneously post-free and not yet free” (108). From Jenkins’s Moonlight, depicting Kevin and Chiron’s ephemeral platonic and romantic communion amid a neoliberal, carceral US South, to highlighting how Essex Hemphill experiences ephemeral sexual pleasure amid Washington, DC’s localized AIDS crisis and War on Drugs, Jenkins and Hemphill alike articulate black ecstasy as affective currency—a non-capitalistic yet generative feeling.
Ethnographers in particular would benefit from Abdur-Rahman’s theory of the Black Ecstatic because it challenges the temporal stagnation and utopian analytics of the ethnographic event, given that “an ethnographic past can become the most vivid part of our present existence”:
Persons, events, puzzlements, and discoveries encountered during fieldwork may continue to occupy our thoughts for many years…our past is present in us as a project, hence our future.” (93)
Thus, the stagnant ethnographic event within anthropology and sociology has overdetermined perception and knowability of continental and diasporic black life within slavery’s and colonialism’s afterlives (6). Therefore, a deployment of the Black Ecstatic refuses the all-too-often methodological and narratological impulse for ethnographers to use the stagnant ethnographic event. The black ecstatic can posit the ethnographic record within its present, meriting protecting the livelihoods of marginalized black people who are contending with quotidian violences that cannot be fixed from liberal-teleological analytics alone.
Hopefully, humanistic social scientists, and not just literary, art, and cultural critics, take up Abdur-Rahman’s new monograph because it is indeed a guidebook for diverse methodological ethics. This monograph provides necessary theoretical frameworks for cultural critics, art historians, and social scientists alike to experiment with and generate new methods and meanings for observing, writing, and theorizing about contemporary black life.
