Towards a postcolonial aesthetics

Abstract

Aesthetic theory has often been regarded with suspicion by postcolonial theorists who see aesthetics as implicated in the canonical marginalization of postcolonial literatures. This article approaches the idea of a postcolonial aesthetics from the point of view of the transformative exchange that occurs in the “contact zone” of the transcultural text. Debates about aesthetics revolve around its status as either an ideology or a stimulus, universal or culturally specific, elitist or quotidian. However, postcolonial texts – visual, auditory and written – produce an aesthetic engagement in which both producer and consumer are transformed, one that may force us to revise our understanding of the utility of aesthetics for postcolonial cultural production. The identification of an affective response that moves across cultural boundaries indicates the kind of intervention that postcolonial theory may make in a number of fields but perhaps none more contested than the field of aesthetics. The article contends that a non-cognitive quality referred to here as “material resonance” opens the way for a transformation of the field of aesthetics by postcolonial notions of cross-cultural engagement.