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Amber Jamilla Musser’s Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined is not about psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysts will find its exploration of race, the body, and sensuality instructive, if not challenging. Professor of English at The Graduate Center CUNY, Musser is a cultural theorist and critic whose earlier publications Sexual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (2018) and Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014) focus on the pleasures and pain of Black and brown bodies in relationship to their history of being both commodified and made sexually available, through what Musser (2018) refers to as the work of “pornotropic projection” (p. 6). In Between Shadows and Noise, Musser again focuses on Black and brown bodies and the challenge they pose to theorizations, including psychoanalysis, which she criticizes for reifying the idea of the sovereign subject and being complicit with the colonial systemic racism of Western thought.
The book is not, however, a work of hardline criticism. Musser instead takes up the fleshiness of Black and brown bodies in terms of the shadows and noise she finds in works of art and cultural production—popular film, photography, live performances, and installations—that offer reparative interventions “against the violent history of representation that has had pernicious effects for those who are not part of dominant groups” (p. 3). Between Shadows and Noise lends to the current reevaluation of the history of racism and psychoanalysis by offering ways to rethink the body with
Black and brown bodies in mind, attuning psychoanalysts to the cultural and sociopolitical inflections of sensation, sensibility, and sensuality.
In the introduction, titled “Body Work,” Musser announces her aim to shift cultural theory and criticism from making speak to making felt. Offering a meditation on the book’s cover, Ming Smith’s 1988 photograph Flamingo