Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity

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This book argues that modernism exposes cultural identities such as blackness as mere strategies of conforming the self into belonging. Bell's examination pursues the question of nonidentity through sound, silence, and gesture, treating these as technologies of reading the contradictions, breakdowns, and erasures that constitute subjectivity. His analysis of these texts reveals that the aesthetic investigations they perform undo the logic of cultural identity, devastating such reductive rubrics as "race" or "gender."