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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
In But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, And White Embodiment, Robin James
In But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, And White Embodiment, Robin James
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The status of the body figures paradoxically in the interrelated discourses of whiteness, aesthetic taste, and hipness. While Richard Dyer’s analysis of whiteness argues that white identity is “in but not of the body,” Carolyn Korsmeyer’s and Julia Kristeva’s feminist analyses of aesthetic “taste” demonstrate that this faculty is traditionally conceived as something “of” but not “in” the body. While taste directly distances whiteness from embodiment, hipness negatively affirms this same distance: the hipster proves his elite status within white culture by positioning himself as, in the words of James Chance’s song title, “Almost Black.” The notion of hip contributes …
Othering The Other: The Spectacle Of Katrina For Our Racial Entertainment Pleasure, Mariana Ortega
Othering The Other: The Spectacle Of Katrina For Our Racial Entertainment Pleasure, Mariana Ortega
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The following essay examines visual representations of hurricane Katrina in popular media in order to show how photography continues to be enlisted in the production of the racial spectacle, the transformation of the plight of people of color into entertainment. The essay also analyzes how such a use of the visual serves to solidify the understanding of people of color by way of a black-white binary that does not do justice to current U.S. demographics. The essay provides a glimpse into the intertwining between the visual and racial thinking.
Mixed-Race Looks, Ronald Sundstrom
Mixed-Race Looks, Ronald Sundstrom
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The multiracial population is growing larger and so is popular awareness about multiracial or mixed-race identity. Simmering beneath the growing public recognition of multiracial identity are questions about the legitimacy of mixed race, multiracial, or biracial as social categories, and further questions about the ethics and politics of those identities. Behind some of these questions are worries about how multiracial identity interacts with racialized aesthetic standards. This essay addresses these issues by investigating whether those affirmations are racist and betray monoracial groups. This essay concludes that such affirmations are not necessarily racist or traitorous. Instead, they are consistent with modern …
Sensation As Civilization: Reading/Riding The Taxicab, Monique Roelofs
Sensation As Civilization: Reading/Riding The Taxicab, Monique Roelofs
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Aesthetics, race, and nation are densely imbricated with one another. This essay examines their interactions in a newspaper column that describes an aesthetic confrontation between a presumably Arab taxi driver and his passenger, a white European-Dutch columnist. In this column, taste engenders acts of identification and abjection, transmits projections of fear, and underwrites a division of labor and virtue. It thereby serves as a racial border patrolling technology and institutes racial boundaries. To clarify the racial power of aesthetic constellations in the taxicab case, the paper turns to the dualities and integrations that theorists such as Addison, Baumgarten, Schiller, and …
Toward A Development Of A Cosmopolitan Aesthetic, Nalini Bhushan
Toward A Development Of A Cosmopolitan Aesthetic, Nalini Bhushan
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this essay I explore the interaction between race and aesthetics in colonial India (1857-1947). In the context of nation building and the Indian independence movement, the Indian art world struggles to articulate conditions for the very possibility of an artist who would be authentically Indian while remaining authentically artistic, a seemingly impossible accomplishment. And yet a chosen few are somehow are able to do just this: cosmopolitan Indian artists, transcending the parochial boundaries of nation, race, ethnicity, and religion as set by tradition, while remaining rooted in something that is nonetheless fundamentally Indian. I focus on three artists from …
Red, Gold, Black, And Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell
Red, Gold, Black, And Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper tries to show that black nationalist movements have been pervasively influential on the music and visual culture of the world. In particular, it focuses on the Marcus Garvey movement and some of its religious expressions or extensions - Rastafarianism and the Nation of Gods and Earths - and on reggae and hip hop music. This is also an illustration of a wider conceptual point: that political ideologies are not only constellations of texts and doctrines but multi-media aesthetic environments. Race itself is articulated in aesthetic categories, not only in terms of body appearance and color, but in cultural …