Aesthetic representation often flattens difference in service of visibility, especially for racialized people who are embedded in histories of disavowal, disenfranchisement, and repression. Amber Jamilla Musser offers a timely intervention into the entanglements between race, politics, and representation in Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined. As the final book in her trilogy, Between Shadows and Noise follows Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance to extend her existing theorization of “sensation” as a Black feminist methodology for art criticism and aesthetic interpretation. Through this method, Musser writes about the forms of embodied knowledge that racialized people possess that escape dominant modes of representation.
Through a study of shadows and noise in film, performance art, photography, and sculpture by mostly contemporary artists of color, Musser rethinks representation by employing a critical method that she dubs “situatedness.” Situatedness is “an analytic rooted in amplifying the politics of difference and corporeality” (9). It extends feminist and queer scholarship on bodily knowledge and the ways we perceive the world through our bodies by underscoring the political significance of difference. Working with shadows and noise as relational and productive categories, Musser asks the following of the art objects she analyzes: “what are we meant to pay attention to and what is devalued or deemed excessive?” (6). Across five chapters, the book tracks the shadows and noise of a generically expansive archive, including Ming Smith’s 1988 photograph Flamingo Fandango (West Berlin) (painted), Jordan Peele’s film Us, Katherine Dunham’s choreography in Shango, Samita Sinha’s performance This ember state, Teresita Fernández’s collage Puerto Rico (Burned) 6, Allora & Calzadilla’s installation Cadastre, and Titus Kaphar’s sculpture A Pillow for Fragile Fictions. Musser opens with a compelling description of Ming Smith’s 1988 photograph Flamingo Fandango (West Berlin) (painted). Describing the “noisiness” of the image, she moves away from the desire to investigate the content of the photograph, instead gesturing towards the “uncontained excess” represented by the painted pink of the flamingos against the background of West Berlin. Through this encounter, the author draws attention to the topography of affect and sensation within which she identifies the potentials of shadows and noise.
The book makes three major propositions. Firstly, Musser offers shadows and noise as alternative sensory modes that evince the density of representation. She illustrates this density in Chapter 1 through the uncanny in Jordan Peele’s Us—by tracing the complicated relationship that Black girls and women have to possession, desire, and the domestic, she suggests that the uncanny in the film is “an overt commentary on the ways that history overburdens possibility” (23). The uncanny is mobilized conceptually here to consider the film’s plot, which revolves around a Black family and their murderous doppelgängers who emerge from the shadows. Throughout this chapter, the author teases out moments in the film that demonstrate the noisy and shadowy ways in which Black women’s sovereignty is imagined, referencing arguments made in her previous books about the linkage of desire to recognition.
The second proposition arrives in response to performances that engage with the covert effects of racialization. By advancing “attunement” as a “critical corporeal method,” Musser extends an invitation to meditate on “how and where sensations, feelings, and sounds aggregate internally” (16). Through attunement, the book calls for a shift towards “radical openness” that “amplifies one’s capacity to sit with what is not necessarily understood but is known through feeling, building certainty in and of enfleshment” (72). By sitting with memories, narratives, and previously learned patterns of behavior, attunement reiterates incoherent, nonverbal, and somatic forms of knowledge production.
The representation of race is differently taken up in Chapter 5, where Musser thinks alongside American contemporary painter Titus Kaphar and the entanglements between racialized labor and commodification. In her discussion of the sculpture A Pillow for Fragile Fictions (2016), she underscores the shadow presence of Tom, a man who served in bondage to George Washington and was later sold for rum, molasses, tamarind, and limes. Citing the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, and Monique Allewaert, this chapter proposes “the metabolic” as a regime of representation that “make[s] visible what is usually unseen: the temporal and energetic economies attached to Black life” (98). By drawing out the aesthetic quality of the metabolic, Musser contends that the colonial desire for sugar and its subsequent production by Black laborers—therefore shortening Black lives—is intrinsically connected to histories of discipline and colonial violence.
The final proposition develops the concepts of “critical situatedness” and the “body-place.” Musser’s archive spans a range of performances that privilege sensual forms of knowing to challenge the separation of interiority and exteriority. Critical situatedness brings to the fore inherited, diasporic, and embodied forms of feeling and being in the world that resist the Euro-American construct of the individuated “I.” The body-place furthers study into nonindividuation by “allow[ing] us to feel for fuller modes of enfleshment, moving beyond subject-object divisions and the spatial, spiritual, and temporal cleavages that produce ‘Man’” (60). Employing situatedness to emphasize the political significance of difference, Musser cites Grace Kyungwon Hong’s use of the term to investigate the ways in which women of color feminists could preserve difference despite its repudiation within neoliberal structures of power. Situatedness allows Musser to contribute to this genealogy by “drawing continuities between women of color feminisms and the cultivation of strategies for sitting with difference as well as recognizing its infinite abundance” (8). In Chapter 2, Musser works with the tension between insider and outsider knowledge in Katherine Dunham’s Shango. As a key figure of Afro-diasporic dance, Dunham’s experience of belonging is marked by possession and her initiation into the practice of Vodou. Through a reading of Dunham’s extended practice and the spinal movements of Tommy Gomez (known as ‘yanvalou’) in the forty-second silent excerpt from the piece, Musser argues that Vodou enabled Black performers and diasporic artists to become agentive through modifications of authenticity.
The infinite abundance of difference is further explored in the book’s revelation of sensational and affective responses to the performances being analyzed. While the spinal movements enacted by Gomez reveal a knot on the author’s right thoracic side, Samita Sinha’s writhing in This ember state (2018) brings a deeper sense of awareness to her psoas. She describes a renewed sensation of being in the body that was activated through the performance, bringing up rage towards systems of colonialism and racism that perpetrate exoticization and sexual violence. These descriptions ground situatedness as a critical method and analytic for Musser to illustrate the plurality of self vis-à-vis sensations, namely “the dull ache of a spinal knot, the sharper pain of tight hip flexors, the bloat of SIBO, the suffocation of COVID-19, the unfurling afforded by rest, abundance in movement, the immersive quality of imagination, and the stillness of attending to the present in order to illuminate peril and possibility as they ricochet between critic and object” (112).
Each chapter includes a description of Musser’s personal encounter with the performance piece, photograph, or sculpture interwoven with the analysis of the work. I find this method to be resonant with other Black feminist scholars who engage in aesthetic interpretation, including Tina M. Campt, Hershini Bhana Young, and Sharon Patricia Holland. Such a writing style lends itself to an experience of polytemporality, a theoretical framework that the book speaks to in its conclusion. Making note of the distinction between the present and “the moment of now” as articulated by Michelle Wright, Musser embodies such a moment with the moving inclusion of her own blog entries from 2022. In these entries, she chronicles her experience of being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), persevering through chemotherapy, and undergoing a bone marrow transplant. Through a description of sensation and personal experience, these pages bring forth Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals to further the polytemporality and plurality of self that emerges when sitting with difference. The stories and anecdotes shared by the author reveal enmeshed systems of repair and care that surface when we pay attention to the shadows and noise of the structures that we find ourselves imbricated in. Attuning ourselves to the conditions that value some lives over others opens the possibilities of imagining alternate ways of being and becoming in the world.
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Archita Arun