Surfaces, Subjectivity, and Self-Denial

None Like Us begins with a story of familial cleavage. Though he does not explicitly delve into its contours, Stephen Best describes a graduation dinner that reveals (to him) a distance between him and his father. Another attendee describes this separation (on the part of father) as having been born from a conflict between pride and disgust—the father is proud of his son's success, but it also announces an unassimilable difference between the two. Best likens this to an injunction to community within Black studies, which he describes as not only uncomfortable but problematic: "the feeling that I am being invited to long for the return of a sociality that I never had, one from which I suspect (had I ever shown up) I might have been excluded" (1). This narrative is meant to explain Best's project, which is to decouple Black studies' relationship between the archive and community. However, this is not just any archive but that of the transatlantic slave trade, which has traditionally undergirded the idea of a Black diaspora, a term that itself has been understood to refer not only to a shared history but to common cultural, aesthetic, and religious practices. Best bristles not only at the mandate to think with slavery when thinking about Blackness but also the assumption that this history provides a useful form of commonality.

Ultimately, Best aims to uncover and work with a productive version of negation: "This coveted alienation would entail a gesture best parsed as a kind of doubled movement: away from the 'clenched little history of our selves' and into a language we would not naturally speak" (37). The first part of the book draws on visual art (El Anatsui, Mark Bradford), poetry (Gwendolyn Brooks), and fiction (Toni Morrison) to show how artists and writers have already been producing these unnatural languages of freedom. This section gives texture to Best's politics while also giving insight into his method of analysis. The second part uses the techniques and politics already honed to return to moments in the archive that have not coalesced into productivity; they neither align with possibilities of resistance or generate new lineages. Rumor and suicide simply are. Here, Best rewrites our understanding of these practices of negation as moments of freedom, even and especially because they don't go anywhere.

By announcing that None Like Us intervenes into Black studies' oscillation between subjection and belonging, Best asks us to look specifically at the parameters of selfhood as it stretches along the axes of projection and expression. Though he does not announce it as such, the perspective that Best is grappling with has psychoanalytic undertones, which we can parse through his indebtedness to Lee Edelman even as psychoanalysis might be said to be a form of symptomatic reading par excellence. Beyond the language of the symbolic, however, psychoanalysis gives us language to think about space between belonging and subjectivity in which Best is interested. When we return to the scene of separation that inaugurates the text, alienation is not merely a condition of queerness but seemingly compelled by a psychoanalytic (glancing at Oedipus) reading of the scene in which renunciation of the father inaugurates a version of selfhood and produces its own scene of fraught belonging. Best acknowledges some of these coordinates—"I have chosen to begin in conversation with Baldwin, in an autobiographical meditation on fathers, sons, and the intimate kinship shadowed from both sides of the relation by its imminent severance, because I am seeking to understand the filial world of subjects and the ethics of subjectivity" (8)—but does not bring this to bear on the book's overall schema. Best's tiptoeing around psychoanalysis is puzzling on the one hand but also, given his investment in surface reading, is understandable. In addition to making more transparent the mechanisms between the making of subjectivity and belonging, thinking psychoanalytically also allows us to plumb the gendered dimensions of Best's argument.

There are several ways to think about Best's...