None Like Us, By Stephen Best
The literary critic Stephen Best begins his 2018 book, “None Like Us,” in notice of a “communitarian impulse” in Black studies. “It announces itself in the assumption that in writing about the black past ‘we’ discover ‘our’ history,” he writes. “It registers in the suggestion that what makes black people black is their continued navigation of an ‘afterlife of slavery.’ ” It could be called melancholic, an identity sustained by exclusion—from history, from politics, the hallowed sites of culture. Best is queasy about this, not for its mood but, rather, the presumption of affirmation to be found on the other side of subjection. Instead, he finds inspiration in works—El Anatsui’s sculptures, Toni Morrison’s “A Mercy(link is external)”—that enact “a kind of thought that literary critics are not yet willing to entertain,” that is, “freedom from constraining conceptions of blackness as authenticity, tradition, and legitimacy; of history as inheritance, memory, and social reproduction; of diaspora as kinship, belonging, and dissemination.” In his study of these texts, Best picks apart the tropes that are often treated as foregone conclusions: that the heirs of a people made chattel would incur and even embrace the terms foisted upon them, that the first-person plural of Black studies is monolithic. I came to this book with an honest portion of chagrin: How often have I intoned a word like “community” in my appraisal of a novel or television show, taking that word for granted as one that exists with some definite sort of racial continuity rather than something to be powerfully disarticulated? The title and provocation of the book come from the abolitionist David Walker, who, in his “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World(link is external),” first published in 1829, prayed that “none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more.” Disaffiliation pairs well with a spritz, I’ve learned. —Lauren Michele Jackson