Rizvana Bradley: Bearing the Unbearable: On the Minor Agonistics of Performance

This talk begins by thinking with Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, and her notion of a “too thick” love. Too thick feeling is a racially gendered problem for affect theory, one that not only exposes the latter's residual humanisms but that opens onto the possibility of thinking with the minor affective registers of Black existence. Highlighting the conjunction between Black critiques of humanism and those repertoires of wayward feeling that subtend Black existence, this talk argues that too thick feeling moves us through the undertheorized racially gendered declensions and transfigurations within registers of feeling such as slowness, exhaustion, bitterness, and perseverance. Moving between Beloved and Charles Burnett's 1978 film Killer of Sheep, this talk suggests that this indeterminate genre of feeling emerges precisely through its immanent exposure to and subjection before an anti-Black world that demands but cannot abide its intelligibility.

Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley has been named the John Grace Memorial Philosopher in Residence at the University of British Columbia. She was the 2023–24 Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Bradley is the author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE. The book was a recipient of the Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Bradley’s work examines modern and contemporary art, film and digital media, and literature through critical interrogations of aesthetic theory, Continental philosophy, and art history in order to rethink the stakes of and methods for the interpretation of aesthetic forms. 

Her scholarship has appeared in Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Film-Philosophy, TDR: The Drama Review, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Film Quarterly, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. She serves on the advisory boards of October and Camera Obscura. Bradley’s art criticism has been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Her work has been translated into four languages. 

Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Galleries, London, the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.

Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2025, Bradley delivered the annual J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz Lecture in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. She has been invited to give keynotes at the Documenta Institut, Jeu de Paume, Kunstmuseum Basel, the University of Amsterdam, Rhode Island School of Design, Tate Britain, Modern Art Oxford, Utrecht University, and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. Bradley has also served as a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art, the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, and was most recently a critic and theorist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is on the advisory board of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.

Before coming to UC Berkeley, Bradley was an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale, an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality at Emory University, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at the University College London. She holds a BA from Williams College and a PhD from Duke University, and was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Rizvana Bradley’s participation in “Transversal Re/Configurations: Flesh, Bodies, and Matter in Motion” was co-curated and co-coordinated by Erika Villeroy da Costa & María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Department of Dance.

Part of “Transversal Re/Configurations: Flesh, Bodies, and Matter in Motion”

Current Topics in Dance Research Colloquium Series: January 08 - March 12, 2026

– María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Curator & Coordinator 

Transversal Re/Configurations: Flesh, Bodies, and Matter in Motion was made possible through generous sponsorships from the California Center for Native Nations; the Rupert Costo Endowment in American Indian Affairs, University of California, Riverside; the CHASS Dean's Office and the Center for Ideas and Society; and the Departments of Music, Ethnic Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Media & Cultural Studies.

Many thanks to: taisha paggett (Department of Dance, Chairperson), Anthea Kraut (Department of Dance, Vice-Chair), Courtney Brubaker (Events Specialist), and Pete Pace (Technical Director) for their generous support of the Colloquium, and to Jonathan Ritter (Department of Music, Chairperson) and María del Rosario Acosta López (Professor, Hispanic Studies Department) for their vision and collaboration.

For Accessibility and Accommodations, contact mariafc@ucr.edu 

Photo credits: Photo of Rizvana Bradley by Cassidy DuHon.

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