Akin Adesokan: Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (2011)

“What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.”

Publisher Indiana University Press, 2011
African Expressive Cultures series
ISBN 0253356792, 9780253356796
230 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-1-28)

Sianne Ngai: Ugly Feelings (2005)

“Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.

Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2005
ISBN 0674015363, 9780674015364
viii+422 pages

Reviews: Jennifer L. Fleissner (Modernism/modernity, 2006), Jennifer Greiman (Leviathan, 2012), Eu Jin Chua (Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 2007), Dina Mendonça (Metapsychology, 2005).

Interview with author (Adam Jasper, Cabinet)
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-5-23)

Jacques Rancière: Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010)

“Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Rancière’s most recent writings on art and politics to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.

In this fascinating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière’s ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a ‘politics of art’ might be.

This important collection includes several essays that have never previously been published in English, as well as a brand new afterword. Together these essays serve as a superb introduction to the work of one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers.”

Edited and Translated by Steven Corcoran
Publisher Continuum, London/New York, Jan 2010
ISBN 1847064450, 9781847064455
240 pages

Reviews: Todd May (NDPR), David W. Hill (Marx & Philosophy).

publisher

PDF (updated on 2024-2-20)