A01=Cecile Bishop
Aesthetics
Author_Cecile Bishop
Category=AGA
Category=JBSL
commodity
diaspora
Edouard Glissant
epidermalization
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Form
forthcoming
iconomy
John Coltrane
Liberation of Paris 1944
Marie-Guillemine Benoist
opacity
photographic form
Photography
Pierre Soulages
portraiture
Samuel Fosso
visibility
Visual Arts
visual perception
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033837
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 23 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Forms of Blackness examines how race can be approached as a form shaped and perceived through visual and aesthetic practices. Cécile Bishop offers a new way of thinking about the politics of visibility and presses readers to question how to interpret what they see.
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 Édouard Glissant and Frantz 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. When 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.
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 Édouard Glissant and Frantz 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. When 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.
Cécile Bishop is Associate Professor of Francophone Post-Colonial Literatures and Cultures at University of Oxford and Kelleher Fellow in French at Oriel College. She is the author of Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny.
