Millennial Style The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture

"In Millennial Style, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman makes a forceful argument for specifying different modes of black experimentation and connecting them explicitly to modes not only of survival but of refusals of various forms of domination. Beautifully written and intellectually engaging, Millennial Style's important sustained analyses of black experimental cultural production and vital insights make a major contribution." - Amber Jamilla Musser, author of (Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined) "Without a doubt Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is one of the most important scholars in black cultural theory, gender studies, and sexuality studies. With this new work, she focuses on the refusal of realism in contemporary black art practices to theorize blackness and being among disaster politics, environmental devastation, state killings of black people, perpetual poverty in the post-Civil Rights era. Millennial Style is a striking, beautifully written, and insistent text that needs to be read by the broadest audience possible." - Roderick A. Ferguson, author of (One-Dimensional Queer) "This groundbreaking text delves into the intricate connections among political terror, social abjection, and aesthetic abstraction within contemporary African diasporic cultural expression. Abdur-Rahman's endeavor represents a profound engagement with black communities' artistic and world-making practices." - Toni Hidayat (African Identities) "A tremendous offering to Black studies and cultural criticism has just entered the conversation. . . . Abdur-Rahman's critical intervention ought to mobilize critics of art and culture to consider the political utility of Black abstraction and related experimental forms while refusing narratives of progress that erase the immense suffering of a modern world created by a consistently shapeshifting anti-Blackness." - Alexandra M. Thomas (Hyperallergic)