GerShun Avilez's Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism is a timely and innovative reinvestigation – or, perhaps more accurately, a reimaging – of intellectual rhetorics around black nationalism. Avilez productively opens up a needed revisionist study of black nationalism and the black arts movement: one that looks at the convergence of politics, aesthetics, and queerness in visual, literary, and performance-based artistic practices.

Largely informed by what Roderick Ferguson has termed “queer of color critique,”Footnote ¹ Avilez asserts that sexual and racial minorities do not reject dominant ideologies such as black nationalism – rather, they negotiate them, finding a productive space for themselves where recognition is possible. In many respects, the author's implementation of queer-of-color critique as an intersectional methodology breaks from more reactionary and totalizing queer and feminist critiques of the black arts movement that characterize it as irrecoverably entrenched in homophobic and heterosexist political, cultural, and visual imperatives. The result of this investigation is a more nuanced discussion of the ways black queer and black feminist cultural producers engaged with questions of gender and sexuality during the black arts movement of the 1960s to 1970s – leading them to often disidentify with the dictates of black nationalism, while simultaneously operating both within and in solidarity with the movement's broader imperative to challenge black inequality.

The various chapters in Radical Aesthetics take on a range of urgent themes: the visual rhetorics of whiteness, the challenges of black unity, the representation of gender identity, and the critical role of sex in black nationalist rhetoric. Avilez's aim, however, is to take a revisionist look at black nationalism and the black arts movement, locating how the critical and representational concerns of gender and sexuality drove artistic production from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. In the book's introduction, “The Art of Revolution,” Avilez radically opts to compare the writings of scholar Larry Neal with the filmmaking of Marlon Riggs. For Avilez, Neal and Riggs share a revolutionary desire to “reorder” and “pervert” traditional artistic strategies, in what the author characterizes as a “shared adherence to progressive politics and social critique rooted in Modern Black Nationalism” (1). Avilez admits that this may appear to be an odd pairing, especially considering that Neal's commitment to essentialist notions of blackness may seem antithetical – if not ideologically opposed – to Riggs's seemingly more progressive and pointed critiques of restrictive conceptualizations of so-called normative or ideal blackness. In many respects, black nationalism has been accused of rigidly advocating a politics of respectability, rooted in a set of proscriptive demands that African American expressiveness must adhere to notions of black uplift, compulsory kinship, and racial fidelity. Neal's inverted nationalism has become synonymous with this legacy. On the other hand, Riggs's work is simultaneously engaged in a cultural politics of resuscitation as well, albeit not through the fragile comforts of intra-cultural respectability – but rather through a type perversion that is engaged in a radical and revolutionary reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic.

The key polemic that Avilez creates here rests on a fault line around divergent approaches to a similar problem: one that may be characterized as both an affirmation and a mobilization of black radical aesthetics, despite the presence of ideological differences. In the case of Riggs, Avilez points out that the late filmmaker reimagined nationalism by introducing the concerns and aesthetics of homosexuality and black queer intimacy in his political and representational activism. What is significant here is how Neal's “inversion” and Riggs's “perversion” both negotiate the political ideology of black nationalism through a process that Avilez characterizes as committed to disruption. The author's term “radical aesthetics” is meant to delineate a form of cultural labor that tests the limits of political radicalism. However, what is most essential is that Neal and Riggs work within the boundaries of black nationalism, a strategy that Avilez calls “disruptive inhabiting” (16).

Chapter 1, entitled “The Claim of Innocence: Deconstructing the Machinery of Whiteness,” cleverly sums up many of the core themes in Radical Aesthetics – and is of particular interest because it is here that Avilez's theory of disruptive inhabiting is further explored. Turning critical attention towards artistic practices – particularly those of playwright Ed Bullins, visual artist Adrian Piper, and poet Cornelius Eady, the author unpacks how these cultural producers engage meaningfully with black nationalism: a move that allows for the dismantling of problematic racial and gender frameworks. The central focus is on how these artists destabilize whiteness by exposing both the racism that is embedded within it and the fantasies of innocence that are central to its ideological violence. The most compelling exemplar discussed is the artist Adrian Piper, a philosopher and conceptualist whose work has taken a myriad of forms. Avilez suggests that Piper's work utilizes a strategy that inhabits and disrupts the rhetoric of white innocence by exposing its representational fantasias. Two of Piper's most iconic series of work are discussed: Mythic Being (1973–76) and Vanilla Nightmares (1986–90). Nightmares consists of a series of conceptual drawings in charcoal and crayon on appropriated pages from the New York Times. The drawings expose the insidious nature of whiteness – and the manner in which its normalization and biases are ideologically embedded within journalism and popular media representation. Avilez claims that Piper and the artists discussed utilize aesthetic radicalism to undermine modes of racialized reasoning: specifically the problem of white innocence. Their employment of performative inhabiting contests the social operation of whiteness that ultimately distorts and demeans black identity.

The subsequent chapters each explore how aesthetic radicalism has been effectively employed as a means to queer representation, so to speak: to engage subversively within and along the parameters of black nationalism. Nevertheless, as the book unfolds there is a distinct and ever-evolving effort to grapple with the more contentious dimensions of black nationalist rhetoric. Chapter 2, “The Suspicion of Kinship: Critiquing the Construct of Black Unity,” takes on the problem of black collectivity – particularly the notion that there are agreed boundaries of racial identity that can be policed. Proposing what Avilez calls a new site of nationalist concern, chapter 3, “The Demands on Reproduction: Worrying the Limits of Gender Identity,” contests the nationalist mantra of solidarity, “closing ranks” as it explores the evolving discourse around the body that emerged during the black nationalist era. Offering several key exemplars, the standout is the acclaimed black feminist artist Faith Ringgold, whose series of paintings, the Slave Rape Series (1972–73), took on the issues of black reproduction. Consisting of a series of nudes, the work functions oppositionally in its imaging of the black female body through concerns of slavery, rape, and childbirth, while simultaneously reexamining the political role of black women in a contentious revolutionary moment. Chapter 4, “The Space of Sex: Reconfiguring the Coordinates of Subjectivity,” examines how artistic production often explored sexual themes and sexual agency through the politicization of the body. The result was that, as Avilez suggests, sex became a “site of social critique within aesthetic radicalism” (164).

Ultimately Radical Aesthetics is a polemically daring reassessment of black nationalism and the black arts movement – and Avilez has found new entry points into a series of discussions that are much in need of reinvigoration. One of the major takeaways, however, is a resubstantiation of a common refrain among scholars engaged in revisionist investigations of the period. Namely there was an overreliance on the demand for unity and collectivity that likely hampered the movement's aims – and in certain respects alienated or marginalized the voices and contributions of women and sexual minorities. It is in this regard that queer-of-color critique is most urgently needed.

If there is one concern to be raised, here, it is in regard to Avilez's critical interpretations of the creative arts. It is an approach that often melds disparate artistic genres, each of which has distinct histories, aesthetic traditions, and unique interpretive frameworks. This methodological choice is one of the more daring aspects of the book. In that regard, one of the major points of contention in Western art discourse is concerned with the notion that art illustrates neither politics nor political positionalities per se. Black art (especially forms of cultural production engaged specifically with racial formation) uproots the fundamental ambiguities that lie in the interstices of legibility: in the ideological reductions that subtend racial coherence. Particularly in regard to an engagement with visual production, there needs to be more sensitive attention given to form and materiality, to gesture, texture, and color – in their affective dimensions that evade political didacticism. Doing so would only serve to reinforce the urgency of aesthetic radicalism. In certain respects, Avilez does not attend to the more unexpected and esoteric forms of representational troubling that artworks uniquely convey. This dimension of art is crucial to black creative production, as it attempts to liberate blackness from its stifling legibility and ideological overdetermination.

Regardless, this set of methodological and interpretive concerns should not undermine the rhetorical brilliance and eloquent writing contained within Avilez's critical project. Radical Aesthetics is essential reading for anyone concerned with the historical and present-day realities of racial inequity and the sociopolitical and artistic response to it.