Postcolonial Aesthetics and the Politics of the Sensible

Abstract

It will be clear by now that the present question of place-body-language relations is part of another “turn” in the study of literature: the growing concern after the linguistic and cultural turns, particularly in postcolonial studies, of treating literature as literature, which is to say, as an aesthetic form of writing that cannot be reduced to a historico-political instrument. Yet, the contemporary debate in postcolonial studies shows how the aesthetic continues to be problematic in fields that are centrally concerned with or even have their origin in questions of oppression, exclusion, and the politics of representation. As Elleke Boehmer sums it up in a recent article on the disjunction between aesthetics and the political or ethical drive of postcolonial readings, the persistent unease with aesthetics in postcolonial studies goes back to notions of the aesthetic as a withdrawal from the world, which we find in ideas of the work as an entity in and for itself, devoid of any instrumentality or interests or political ends. Naturally, Kant looms large in this philosophy of aesthetics. Kant’s aesthetic judgment involves an exercise of detachment and impartiality in order to appreciate how a transcendental work of art represents itself as beautiful and harmonious beyond cultural and authorial intentions and without any interests, goals, or ends (Boehmer, 2010, 172).