The Brooklyn Rail

Aesthetic theory has long prioritized art’s visual and intellectual dimensions. Whether focused on judgments about beauty or critiques of the status quo, theorists from Kant to Adorno to Rancière have prioritized the thinking artworks make possible ahead of the sensations and experiences they induce. Amber Jamilla Musser has been a leading voice for reconsidering these tendencies. In her first two books, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and in this new book, Musser argues that the embodied sensations induced by encounters with artworks are essential tools for responding to violence and enacting alternative futures. Musser extends and complicates these arguments in her new book, Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Engaging a surprising range of contemporary film, performance, sculpture, and photography, the book focuses even more directly than before on the sensual and affective details of Musser’s own aesthetic encounters. Through these “situated” rather than detached interpretations, the book demonstrates the critical force of feeling and how it enables artists, audiences, and all of us to recognize our embeddedness in one another’s lives.

Musser responds to Jordan Peele’s unsettling 2019 horror film Us in the book’s first chapter. As she does throughout the book, she locates her analysis in the feelings and associations the film evokes. Us tells the story of an upper-middle class Black family, the Wilsons, who are attacked by their doubles, a family “tethered” to them through a failed government experiment. Musser notes an “uncanny” resemblance between the film’s dramatization of their interactions and her own experiences as a queer, mixed-race daughter of the Caribbean diaspora. For example, Peele’s depictions of the mothers of the two families, Adelaide and Red, lead Musser to reflect on the unattainable desires for “affiliation and belonging” she experienced growing up. Musser notes that as the film proceeds, we get the impression neither Adelaide nor Red quite belongs. Peele reinforces their displacement by showing them shadowing one another in tightly intercut scenes. The film’s final twist further destabilizes our sense of their identities. Musser describes Red and Adelaide’s final confrontation in visceral detail. She interprets their struggle as a vivid example of the “lengths to which the desire for bodily autonomy persists even in conditions of deep deprivation.”

In the end, Us upends our expectations about heroes and villains. It is, in Musser’s words, “noisy in its illegibility and uncanny in its disruption of an imagined ontological stability.” Because of this “noise,” she explains, the film demands “body work,” a mode of attention and response rooted in embodied and reflective awareness. Bodies are always situated in particular times and places and thus being influenced by specific histories and their aftereffects. We tend to ignore our situatedness when it forces us to reckon with contradictions in our experiences and our relations with others. Musser theorizes “body work” as an alternative to the thinking that takes over in these moments. In a nuanced analysis of Samita Sinha’s 2018 performance This ember state, for example, Musser feels chronic pain and embodied memories of childhood sexual abuse emerging from within. She treats these feelings as a “layer of noise” that disrupts the pressure she feels to know and understand what each gesture and movement of Sinha’s performance means. Noise—both actual and conceptual—opens a somatic and affective space that allows her to experience multiple responses to Sinha and multiple aspects of herself simultaneously.

The complexities of This ember state invite attunement, a form of “body work” constituted by openness and “somatic reactivity.” Musser attunes herself to several other works throughout Between Shadows and Noise, including Ming Smith’s 1988 painted photograph of flamingos featured on the cover, dance works by Katherine Dunham, sculptures by Titus Kaphur, and installations by the collaborative Allora & Calzadilla. Her responses to these works gather into three essential claims. First, bodies are porous rather than self-contained, a contradiction of the neoliberal assumption that individuals, rather than communities or ecologies, are primarily responsible for their life outcomes. Second, selves are active compositions, always in process and subject to change, rather than static or persistent entities. These claims combine to necessitate a third: Blackness consists in possibility and excess. Musser links this final claim to Kevin Quashie’s theory of Black aliveness, Tina Campt’s argument for the generative power of refusal, and Saidiya Hartman’s visionary histories of subjection and waywardness, among other recent advances in the scholarship of Black aesthetics.

Between Shadows and Noise is a vital contribution to this urgent and flourishing field. Musser’s choice of works and her consistently situated responses to them create space for interpretive complexity. She calls us into our bodies and insists that all of us are more varied and variable than we have been allowed to believe. More than that, she invites us to join her in investing “not only in a future that we could share but also in an orientation to the world that prioritizes being and thinking with another.” Between Shadows and Noise ends with journal entries Musser composed while undergoing treatment for leukemia, including a bone marrow transplant with cells taken from her brother. The entries detail how the cancer and its treatment affected her body and sense of self. “I’m on a constant learning curve with my body and its changing needs,” she writes, “getting to know all of these different Ambers and appreciate them and then let them go and welcome the new bodies and shapes to come.” She emphasizes the care she receives throughout her illness and recovery from doctors, nurses, family members, and friends. They are nodes in a network of support. As parts, now, of Between Shadows and Noise, they are also nodes in a network of meanings that refuse reduction to their most visible or intellectually convenient dimensions.