Non-Western Aesthetics as a Colonial Invention

Abstract

As we seek to educate our children in a multicultural society to understand and appreciate and to be able to interact with a culturally diverse and evershrinking world, we need to ask ourselves whether Western forms of knowledge are appropriate for understanding non-Western forms of culture; in particular, whether Western aesthetics is appropriate for understanding and appreciating non-Western art. And so, in this symposium we raise the question of non-Western aesthetics. Are there non-Western aesthetics and if so, what are they? The first thing we must realize in this undertaking is that the world does not come conveniently prepackaged for us into neat compartments of Chinese aesthetics, Indian aesthetics, African aesthetics, Polynesian aesthetics, American aesthetics, and so on. Any discussion of nonWestern aesthetics initiated from within Western aesthetics must be (and can only be) a cross-cultural comparison. Aesthetics is an English word (or some related European derivative of the Greek) to which non-Western culture is compared. Are certain portions of Chinese, Indian, African, Polynesian, Native American thought sufficiently similar to what we know and understand as Western aesthetics to be called aesthetics? This is