Forms of Blackness - Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World

Considering race as form across literature, theory, painting, and photography, Cécile Bishop’s Forms of Blackness explores the formal devices that make Blackness both visible and recognizable. In keeping with Black Francophone theorists like Glissant and Fanon, Bishop uses the ambiguities these aesthetic forms carry to explore a range of identity concepts like opacity, formlessness, and doubleness. Bishop puts Blackness-as-race and blackness-as-form in dialogue, showing how race disrupts the concept of artistic autonomy and how the aesthetic challenges race as a self-evident visual phenomenon. Thought together, form does not isolate blackness from race but rather calls attention to the material substrate that turns race into a phenomenon that can be experienced through sense perception. Moving between careful analysis and experimental modes of critique, Forms of Blackness offers a new way of thinking about the politics of visibility and offers a pressing invitation to question the ways we interpret what we see.