The Cultural Promise of the AestheticAesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 5 | |
2 Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions | 29 |
3 The Gendered Aesthetic Detail | 57 |
4 Beautys Moral Political and Economic Labor | 89 |
5 The Aesthetics of Ignorance | 107 |
6 An Aesthetic Confrontation | 129 |
7 Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism | 151 |
8 Aesthetic Promises and Threats | 177 |
Postscript | 209 |
Notes | 213 |
| 243 | |
| 257 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
according activities aesthetic experience aesthetic promises aesthetic relationality aestheticization affective agency animation appear artistic artworks beauty body Botero’s bring collective conception connections considers constitutes critical cultural Danto’s desire detail differentiation dimensions distinctions economic elements embodied encounter engagement epistemic existence experience feeling feminine feminized field figures finds forces formations forms functioning gender give ground hand happiness historical hold human Hume Hume’s idea ignorance imagination individual interpretation judgment kind knowledge limits Macabéa’s masculine material meaning modes moral nature Neruda norms notion objects observer odes offers operations organization painting participation particular passions perception persons play pleasure poems political position possibilities practices present production racial reader reading reason registers relational relationships sense sensory shape social stands structures subjects taste theory things threats turn understanding women