Alfreda’s Cinema presents Netherworld: The Anteaesthetic Experiments of Black Women

“Revealing [in] its tremendous and violent power,” Anteaesthetics, Dr. Rizvana Bradley’s 2023 book, argues that the aesthetic operations which reproduce Blackness as a threshold for the antiblack world are both irreducibly corporeal and racially gendered—borne singularly by the Black feminine. 

"Black feminine flesh involves not only the reproduction of blackness as the constitutive and delimiting threshold of the racial regime of aesthetics but also the reproduction of blackness as a dehiscence that this regime must constantly work to suture...Black art compels us to think through the irreducibly corporeal, reproductive cut of this dehiscence...These practices do not fashion another world nor supersede the world they would refuse, rather, they inhabit the world's negative underside...  [Black art's] inhabitancy is neither worldly nor worlding but an illimitable descent made to come before the world." —Anteaesthetics

In this unique, one night only program, Dr. Rizvana Bradley offers a defining philosophy on Black art's vexed emergence from a netherworld. Alfreda's Cinema, thinking with and alongside Dr. Bradley, understands Black women's film and art as anteaesthetic practices fashioned from the negative underside of the aesthetic. This program, which demonstrates Bradley's foundational arguments, also resonates with the way blackness is compelled to dwell in the obscurity of this netherworld, and features works by Zion Estrada, Corinne Spencer, Ina Archer, and Andreea Kindryd. 

Alfreda's Cinema returns with Netherworld: The Anteaesthetic Experiments of Black Women, followed by a conversation with author, philosopher, and professor Rizvana Bradley.

Films include:
Hunger (2023) dir. Corrine Spencer
2,340 Miles From 1880 (2023) dirs. Zion Estrada, Mitch McEwen
Black Black Moonlight (2024) dir. Ina Archer
Tijintu Pakani: Sunrise Awakening (1975) dir. Andreea Kindryd

Photo by Cassidy DuHon