"Millennial Style examines recent Black experiments in writing and the visual arts that start from a place of trauma. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman's work underscores that all the millennial attempts-artistic and political-to gain full human citizenship have failed to change the ongoing situation and danger of Black lives. Where earlier Black writers might have employed a more realist mode to make a case for justice, the Black avant-garde work of today reaches for more experimental ways to convey the horrors of the changing same. The chapters outline four modes that have been widely employed: Black Grotesquerie, Hollowed Blackness, Black Cacophony, and the Black Ecstatic. Each chapter explores a particular form using Black feminist and queer theory along with examples from across different arts"-- Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman examines how contemporary avant-garde black art and writing by Wangechi Mutu, Marci Blackman, Alexandria Smith, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Harmony Holiday, and Essex Hemphill use experimental methods to represent and imaginatively remediate racial harm
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