Sensual Excess

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production

In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters.

To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Amber Jamilla Musser is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Sensual Excess, also published by NYU Press.

Uri McMillan, author of Embodied Avatars: Geneaologies of Black Feminist Art and Performance:
In a feat of sheer poeticism, Sensual Excess offers readers a lucid consideration of various representational strategies employed by artists of color in order to rewrite the scripts positioned on their bodies. Mussers attunement to the sensesespecially taste, touch, and smelllend a particularly textured quality to the book, and aids in her brilliant construction of an expansive and juicy framework for pondering the rich versions of the self, and the other, as staged in brown feminine performance.

Seductive, urgent, and poetic, Sensual Excess is a vital contribution to psycho-analytic theory, critical race studies, and queer theory. Guided by the senses and therefore not inhibited by mastery, Musser still manages to astonish the reader with her dazzling theoretical dexterity, a model for the relentless engagement one must deploy in projects concerning flesh.

Tending to a lush theoretical ground of brownness and being realized through the senses, Amber Musser’s Sensual Excess challenges the very dimensions of normative ways of reading and sensing minoritarian epistemologies…. Inviting empathy and embodiment to ways of knowing, the text pulses with both sentient and critical offerings from an archive of explicit body performances that center racialized and sexualized works of art.