Amber Musser’s Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined is a shadow without an originary object—a sourceless cacophony. Musser’s two previous monographs— Sensational Flesh (2014) and Sensual Excess (2018)—established her as a preeminent thinker of and against dialectics: in her oeuvre, she makes it clear how this structure of thinking moves relentlessly forward and also produces, in its movement, a linearization of logic and sense that conforms to (and ultimately produces) a liberal humanist version of subjectivity.

Between Shadows and Noise builds on her previous studies both formally and argumentatively. The monograph investigates a series of works that Musser deems “noisy” and “shadowy.” By this, she means that they refuse a kind of central coherence, offering many versions of themselves which change depending on the angle from which they are approached. Drawing from a long history of the “otherwise” as it appears in Black scholarship, queer theory, and art historical criticism, Musser here conducts a series of epistemological experiments which investigate otherwise. While each chapter of the volume does contain a pivotal artistic text through which other interpretations and meditations pass, it would mischaracterize the work to say that these texts organize each chapter.

In the field of optics, prisms separate different wavelengths of light through a column of glass, scattering and shattering one coherent beam into a rainbow, organized neatly by wavelength. Here, Musser’s shadow method acts as a kind of disorganizing, cacophonous prism: the central artistic work she considers within each chapter diffracts her critical insights through itself and produces a refractory array of readings which do not organize themselves and which do not suggest a singular critical thesis. Moreover, even as Musser explicitly draws methodologically from a rich canon of Black theoretical mainstays like Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Calvin Warren, José Muñoz, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and others, she also responds to recent trends in postcritical writing by refusing the critical self, too, as an organizing center. While the work does concern itself with the relationship between Musser’s life and the artworks she explores, the autotheoretical is neither the outcome of, nor the prism through which, the work of criticism happens. The book is itself comprised of noises and shadows: and, without the central unifying point of an originary object, it contests the conditions under which criticism-as-such can happen at all, especially in relation to objects which are concerned—as this book is, and as its art objects are—with Black feminist interpretation. What is produced, then, is a noisy, shadowy method.

Musser’s introduction opens with a reading of an almost indecipherable image, a painted photograph of flamingos entitled Flamingo Fandango (West Berlin) (Painted) by Ming Smith (1988). The introduction establishes the larger critical gestures of this shadow method as Flamingo Fandango evokes, for Musser, a “polymorphousness within representation that emerges from these sensual methods” (8). Resisting the language convention that the photograph “captures” the image of shadowy flamingos against a leafy-but-indistinct dusky background, here the point is that Smith does precisely the opposite. The flamingos here evade critical and artistic capture even as they exist in the postcolonial context of a West Berlin Zoo. The saturated shadows, the noisy and incoherent shapes of the birds, and the metaphorical echoes all coalesce and evoke Musser’s new method, which contrasts the single unified interpretative work that criticism purports to do. Musser’s readings traverse the autobiographical and autotheoretical, evoking her own relationship to diasporic Caribbeanness; at the same time, she also explores the potentials of opacity and cacophony as fundamentally relational terms which constitute and resist a kind of empiricism that, in a familiar recitation, ground the hegemonic white cisheterosexual imperial Western humanist subject.

It’s difficult, given Musser’s methodological innovations, to summarize any chapter while also doing justice to the way her echoey insights structurally resist easy intellectual capture. The first chapter is focalized around Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), arguing that its visualization of duality within Black girl and womanhood and its exploration of its uncanniness can supplement contemporary moves in Black theory. Moreover, a key insight in this chapter is that the difficulty of interpreting this film is symptomatic of the “noisiness” of its central figures, particularly the relationship between doppelgängers Adelaide and Red (both played by Lupita Nyong’o). This chapter traces a number of interpretations without giving any of them precedence, drawing out insights about racial passing, the uncanny, the peculiar polytemporalities of Black womanhood, and the evocative shadows they cast onto Musser’s own experience. Musser refuses to produce a unified critical interpretation of the film’s meaning, and thus the film’s mixed critical reception becomes uncannily recuperated because of its illegibility, a move which presages the work taking place throughout the rest of the book.

One of the most exciting gestures in this first chapter is Musser’s work on the “imperial grammars of Blackness,” a notion which she draws from the work of Erica Edwards. While she does not explicitly articulate this concept, Musser’s intervention suggests that there is a kind of “shadow grammar” to Blackness. In a noisy shadow to Calvin Warren and Hortense Spillers, Musser’s suggestion of “shadow grammar” might be an adequate way to describe the relationship of her critical insights to the artworks which she explores.

This effacement of the subject returns in chapter two, which explores the work of performance artist and dancer Tommy Gomez, the choreographer Katherine Dunham, and a recorded performance of the piece Shango (1947). This chapter explores the reverberations of syncretic Afro-Caribbean religious practices, particularly around possession and summoning, in Dunham’s oeuvre. In this chapter, the dynamic tension of the fluid dancing body and the attempts to enclose it within restrictive interpretative practices—Musser explores the labile and enclosing capacity of muscle fascia—offers a resistance to embodied singularity that resonates with the ongoing considerations of the text’s central terms.

Chapter three interrogates the relationship between place and body, exploring how the interrelation between the two has profound effects on interpretative practice. Here, Musser brings her sense of the “oceanic” to bear on Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic account of Black subjectivity to offer the “body-place” as a composite term which “allows us to feel for fuller modes of enfleshment, moving beyond subject-object divisions and the spatial, spiritual, and temporal cleavages that produce ‘Man’” (60). In exploring body-place in conversation with This ember state by sound artist Samita Sinha, Musser suggests that the critical method she’s forging might result not in discernment, but instead in an embodied “awareness of multiplicity” (71) that resists being “thought through” (72). Sinha’s piece “explores noise’s function as world making” (66) by drawing together the artist’s training in classical Indian music with iterative and improvisational performance practices. Sinha’s work explores the tensions within generation and destruction as evoked by the Hindu goddess Sati, whose self-immolation is evoked and wrestled with through disclosures and foreclosures of access to the artist’s body, her language, and interpretation. This nonessential performance expresses the need for audiences to attune to work, which for Musser evokes a coproduced relation steeped in mutual vulnerability and curiosity (71) as well as, intriguingly, an acceptance of foreclosure and nonresistance to “dense” texts which defy the disintegration which is a part of standard of critical viewing practices.

The notion of unresolved and resistant multiplicities continues into the fourth chapter, which argues for resonance and “likeness” as an important and irreducible artistic and critical mode that can not and should not be reduced to an ontological “is.” Musser’s archive is most varied in this chapter for this reason—she touches on the poetry of Ocean Vuong and Aimé Césaire in harmony with installation art by duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, as well as Teresita Fernández’s 2018 piece Puerto Rico (Burned) 6. Across this expansive set of texts, Musser ties the body-place work from the previous chapter to both personal and contemporary narratives of ecopocalypse as well as the extractive and racialized economies that animate and accelerate anthropogenic climate disaster, especially in colonized places in the Caribbean. The interpretative potential of likeness, like the noisy and shadowy, lies in the way that it creates spaces of affiliation without reduction, and this richness contrasts the restrictive neoliberal move towards austerity and its underlying hegemonic ideological investments.

Musser’s final chapter flips its focus to the body’s interior, focusing on the dubious prism of Titus Kaphar’s A Pillow for Fragile Fictions (2016) along with deeply embodied explorations of the interior sensations of sourness and rest. Musser reads Kaphar’s statue (a glass bust of George Washington filled with tropical goods including tamarind and rum) as evoking the shadow presence of Washington’s enslaved laborers, particularly a man named Tom who appears in Washington’s mercantile archive. In tracing the global and temporal flows of commodities and the strange metabolics of race into and through the consumable and the digestible, and with consideration for these categories within the COVID-19 pandemic, Musser’s chapter thinks through how rest and cessation both speak about and through the shadows of the systems which they uphold.

The book concludes with Musser’s notes on inflammation, presented largely through scattered diary entries from her experience with cancer diagnosis and treatment. Musser argues that criticism is a form of extension: thus, this monograph represents an extension of her enervated body that, as her medical experiences suggest, resists wholeness and which refuses to produce a unified and coherent singular form. In one sense, this conclusion illuminates the methodological and critical work the book does—but more accurately, it reverberates these ideas a final time, casting another critical silhouette into the richly textured yet indiscernible depths that Musser evokes.