Aesthetic Turn Research Articles

Decolonising and the Aesthetic Turn in International Studies: Border Thinking, Co-creation and Voice

The aesthetic turn (AT) in International Studies stresses the ongoing task of marshalling non-western insights to better explore the agency of the globally marginalised in discourses about representability. Decolonial literature also calls specifically for more understanding of relationality and co-creativity underpinning agency and voice in global politics. Building on this decolonialising challenge, this article embeds a focus on ‘ordinary language use’ within a ‘decolonial orientation’ to open up complexities around the politics of representability. It specifically employs the concept of ‘border thinking’ by Walter Mignolo; and centres struggles in language by Gloria Anzaldúa as well as in the vernacular language ‘Verlan’ (as used by working-class racially marginalised people in France) to think ‘from’ the border. Highlighting how language works across (not just within) different registers and forms, the categories of ‘non-standard’ and ‘standard’, ‘domination’ and ‘resistance’ are destabilised. This provides the basis for re-centring Othered voices within a more relational co-creative ontology, by making the entanglement of discipline and resistance a space to think modernity from, rather than a space of interruption into modernity. Décolonisation et tournant esthétique dans les études internationales : pensée frontalière, co-création et voix

Geopoetics: A Visual Language of Peace in Wim Wenders’ Films

In line with the critical movement that in the last two decades has led to an ‘aesthetic turn’ in the International Relations (IR) field, this article introduces the notion of geopoetics as a useful conceptual category for the analysis of peace, security, and politics. Conceiving geopoetics as an operative concept that helps to understand the political and social experience of geographical space through the most varied forms of artistic expression, this article investigates the work of the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, seeking to show how his filmography, when examined as a whole, constitutes a kind of geopoetic discourse of peace that offers an aesthetic critique, immanent to the very formal possibilities of cinematic technique that challenges dominant geopolitical and geostrategic approaches that continue to naturalise war and violence as necessary instruments of international politics. Relying on the concept of geopoetics and on the political relevance of cinema within the aesthetic turn observed in the IR field, the article argues that geopoetics contributes to expand the epistemological and methodological boundaries of the IR field and to developing a broader conception of peace in the discipline.

Five Looks at Emmaus: Revelation, Resonance, and the Sacramental Imagination

The intersection between religious experience and aesthetic experience has become so obvious that the current “aesthetic turn” in Christian theology no longer needs to be defended. In this essay, I discuss that intersection point from the point of view of Roman Catholicism, in order to demonstrate the bold claim that the arts and the performance they evoke from us are as important as the creed for Catholicism. The essay aims to do three things: first, to examine that intersection point and emphasize the elements of intentionality and desire; second, to analyze one expression of that intersection, namely the connection among Catholic faith claims, the visual arts, and Catholicism’s incarnational-sacramental imagination (using depictions of the post-Resurrection Emmaus story); third, to use hints from Hartmut Rosa’s recent work on “resonance” to tease out how revelation and transformation occur at this intersection.

Democratic Aesthetics, Aesthetic Democracy

AbstractThis essay reviews four new books, each of which assesses the prospects of contemporary democracy in the face of wide-ranging crises—from the legacies of settler colonialism to the resurgence of right-wing nationalism—and finds possibilities for democratic renewal in aesthetic orientations and practices. Taken together, Jason Frank’s The Democratic Sublime (2021), Andrés Fabián Henao Castro’s Antigone in the Americas (2021), Michael Steinberg’s The Afterlife of Moses (2022), and Elisabeth Anker’s Ugly Freedoms (2022) suggest that the aesthetic turn in democratic theory most closely associated with the work of Jacques Rancière has been decisive. But if democratic theorists now fully embrace the centrality of creativity, performative assembly, and affective attachment and aversion to democratic renewal, they do not fully agree on the more fundamental question of whether democracy is a stable form that has aesthetic features or whether it is constitutively aesthetic—in other words, whether its people comes into being in moments of materialization with no prior referent.If contemporary political theorists . . . have found better prospects for the revitalization of democratic politics in collective performance and creative resistance than in . . . legal and political institutions, this shows how seriously . . . democratic thought has come to take democracy’s aesthetic dimensions.

Contemporary Art and Sufi Aesthetics in European Contexts

This article examines the work of seven contemporary artists whose aesthetics exemplify the “lived” experience of Islamic mysticism or Sufism (Arabic tasawwuf) within a European context. The work of artists born in Islamic majority countries and familiar with “traditional” Sufi idioms and discourses, but now immersed in Western culture, is often associated with “diasporic art”. From this hybrid perspective some of their artistic narratives reconfigure or even subvert the “traditional” Sufi idioms, and do so in such a way as to provoke a more profound sensory experience in the viewer than traditional forms of art. Drawing upon recent methodological tendencies inspired by the “aesthetic turn”, this study explores post- and decolonial ways of thinking about Sufi-inspired artworks, and the development of a transcultural Sufi-inspired aesthetic within the context of migration and displacement over the last half-century.

Towards an intersectional literary criticism: Cross-Identity representations, social location, and Shani Mootoo’s intervention

ABSTRACT This article explores how literary critics can approach cross-identity representations in a way that addresses the complex use of alterity by authors who re/construct pluralistic societies and are also marginalized by the colonial matrix of power. Recent theorists such as Mark Bracher have noted that social justice is as imperative to literary scholarship as the late 20th- to early 21st- century aesthetic turn (identified by Ruth Gilligan) that decried an overemphasis on political readings. It is argued here that literary criticism should use an intersectional approach. Key elements of intersectionality, as articulated by Sirma Bilge and Patricia Hill Collins, are applied to literary study and in particular to Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Such a framework makes the question of “good” and “bad” representations irrelevant and uses authorial identity as but one piece of a larger literary approach that honours the complexity of literature alongside undeniable power dynamics.

Aesthetics in the Eugenics Movement: A Critical Examination

Abstract Although multiple scholars have pushed music education to embrace the aesthetic as a curricular and pedagogical touchstone, research surrounding this aesthetic turn has largely framed aesthetics as a sensory experience rather than a social technology (one that can both liberate and oppress). In response, I address the following question: how do uncritical aesthetic philosophies and the experiences they engender act as a means of oppression within music education? By way of example, I approach this question through a text analysis of writings on aesthetics from The Eugenics Review, a long-running publication that disseminated eugenics news and research. In doing so, I construct a eugenical theory of aesthetics that illuminates how eugenicists used aesthetics to enact what Foucault defines as pastoral power and assert control of bodies and populations through education. I then frame the writings of Carl Seashore (a pioneering music education researcher and avowed eugenicist) within this eugenical theory of aesthetics, revealing the ways that Seashore used aesthetic theory to forward eugenical arguments. I conclude with implications for contemporary educators and researchers, sounding a call for a deep and critical examination of all aesthetic formations within music education.

Comment on Paolo Euron’s “Uncanny Beauty: Aesthetics of Companionship, Love, and Sex Robots”

Paolo Euron's "Uncanny Beauty: Aesthetics of Companionship, Love, and Sex Robots" lays out a vision for appreciating sex robots in aesthetic terms, centering the concept of "beauty" as a measure of what they can inspire culturally and existentially. In these comments I turn toward the field of human-robot interaction and the ethical challenges that inhabit the core of such an aesthetic turn.

The aesthetic turn in border studies: Visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion

AbstractIn recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the “aesthetic turn” that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, suggesting possible avenues for future critical aesthetics‐engaged research on COVID‐19 era border reconfigurations. To do so, we first briefly outline the theoretical evolution of border studies, paying attention to recent conceptualisations of borders as dynamic processes of social and spatial differentiation. We then build on the borderscapes concept to unpack research on border aesthetics, with particular attention to the heterogeneous roles played by visual objects such as maps, photographs and videos in shaping both hegemonic and counter‐hegemonic processes of bordering. Finally, we bring these contributions into discussion with recent insights on the COVID‐19 pandemic, sketching several ways to advance aesthetic concepts and methodologies in academic research on borderscapes that are emerging with, and will likely outlast, the pandemic. We suggest that border studies and affiliated sub‐fields can gain useful insights from attending more explicitly and robustly to dynamic visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion.

Democratic freedom as an aesthetic achievement: Peirce, Schiller and Cavell on aesthetic experience, play and democratic freedom

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom.

Adorno leitor de Kierkegaard: ou, a estética de conteúdo como herança materialista

We intended in this paper (I) to show the elements that constitute Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel and (II) the implications of this criticism for a supposed aesthetic turn made by Adorno in his philosophy as a possibility to overcome the hegelian dialectic. The hypothesis that we will raise here is that in the criticism of Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic, Adorno realizes the possibility of building a notion of unrestricted rational experience that will make possible the effective exit of idealism, especially through what he will later call dialectical materialist aesthetics (materialistisch-dialektischen Ästhetik). We will try to show that when moving Kierkegaard's thought against Hegel (and vice-versa), what Adorno does, besides critically reconstructing the Hegelian idea of ​​dialectics, is to promote the implosion of the idealism present in both authors. In other words, he performs a materialist interpretation of the dialectic that brings to consciousness the mediated (necessary) character of the subject's real and concrete experience with the world, without subtracting one pole from the other, i.e., a dialectic that aims at the disintegration of the idealistic model constitutive subjectivity without eliminating subjectivity nor its opposite pole.

On law as poetry: Shelley and Tocqueville

Consonant with the ongoing “aesthetic turn” in legal scholarship, this article pursues a new conception of law as poetry. Gestures in this law-as-poetry direction appear in all three main schools in the philosophy of law’s history, as follows. First, natural law sees law as divinely inspired prophetic poetry. Second, positive law sees the law as a creative human positing (from poetry’s poesis). And third, critical legal theory sees these posited laws as calcified prose prisons, vulnerable to poetic liberation. My second and third sections interpret two texts at the intersections among these three theories, namely Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Shelley identifies a poetic rebirth in the ruins of natural law, suggesting a philosophy of law as “natural poesis”. And Tocqueville names several figurative aristocracies capable of redeploying aristocratic law against democratic despotism, suggesting a philosophy of law as “aristo-poetic counterforce”. Finally, I propose a new theory of law as poetry bridging these two theories, “natural aristo-poetic counterforce”.

Whistling, Gender, and the Aesthetic Turn in Mexico City

Among certain communities of rural Mexico, whistles are used to mimic the melody of spoken words in order to facilitate long-distance communication. In Mexico City, rural-urban migration has produced an aesthetic turn—there whistles endure but decoupled from their paralinguistic function, reflecting a fluid lexicon of symbolic performance in which imaginaries of gender and social class are key to their deciphering. This article proposes that a focused examination of urban whistles from a sociocultural perspective is essential in understanding precisely how these rapid social transformations are experienced and understood at the intersubjective level.

Beauty or Monster? The Renewal of Interest in Hermaphrodites During the 18th Century

The interest of artists and art historians in hermaphrodites led to an aesthetic turn of sexual divergence during the Age of Enlightenment. Authors such as Winckelmann, Schiller or Lessing discovered the beauty of bodies which had been considered to be monsters in previous centuries. The numerous publications on the topic reflect not only the investigation of the corporal specifications of hermaphroditism but also the discovery of a phenomenon which was later on termed as 'psychical hermaphroditism'. The visual culture of the time supported this revelation with the popular portrayal of ephebic and feminized masculinity, mostly in neoclassical style.

Webs and Threads and Shirts of Destiny: Textile Imagery and the Aesthetics of Transmission in Barbara Honigmann’s Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004) and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014)

Daughter narrators in autobiographical and autofictional texts by contemporary Jewish women writers such as Barbara Honigmann and Katja Petrowskaja employ textile imagery to overcome traumatic ruptures and losses of tradition. The history of (Jewish) embroidery and needlework in general is being evoked and alluded to in their literary texts, often via the character of the grandmother. The act of translation from cultural technique to literary text enables the writers to reconnect with Jewish and female artistic traditions, establishing new transnational genealogies of female artistic creation. Honigmann’s own female and Jewish version of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ and Natalia Ginzburg’s concept of a poetry of ‘nothing much’ advocate a commitment to a poetics of the domestic and the seemingly trivial with a decidedly subversive edge. Both aesthetic approaches turn exclusion from male genealogies of literary and religious authority into a strength, asking questions about truth, memory, belonging and the problem of both traumatic and cultural inheritance. Tweetable Abstract: The use of textile and domestic imagery in the literature of contemporary Jewish women authors serves as a strategy to overcome genealogical and traumatic ruptures.

A call for dissensus in art education!

This article argues for the relevance of the term dissensus by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière in an art educational context in particular and an educational context in general. This argument is based on research referred to in this article, where the author made use of dissensus to analyse how encounters with contemporary art contribute to movements in youngsters’ ways of relating to artworks and the environment that surrounds them, as well as changes in the ways of relating to themselves and others – what here is called events of subjectivation. As dissensus is seen as a premise for subjectivation, the author argues for initiating dissensus by introducing students to both art and educational practices that contrast the norm and disrupt the expected. The article also discusses why dissensus as an educational strategy and an aesthetic turn in education seems to be urgent in a contemporary educational climate.

'A Tale of Two Launches’: an arts-based, autoethnographic inquiry into decolonising art therapy in the context of (post)colonial Australia

This article is an arts-based, autoethnographic account of the deep learning experience of launching an innovative art therapy text, Art Therapy in Australia: Taking a Postcolonial, Aesthetic Turn, for two different Australian contexts and audiences: Indigenous colleagues on Wathaurong country at the Institute of Koorie Education (IKE), Deakin University, and the art therapy community on Darug country at Western Sydney University. This article extends the (post)colonial and aesthetic concerns of the book as we reflect on and respond with artmaking and writing to an immersive ten-day retreat with Indigenous colleagues at IKE and seek to respectfully engage with First Nation ways and knowledges. The accounts offered here become a microcosm of the problematics of ethically encountering difference, in a landscape still shadowed by colonial violence.

Politics of Symbolism: The Making of Birsa Munda’s Statue in Post-colonial Jharkhand, India

Birsa Munda, Adivasi leader (Indigenous people) led a rebellion at the end of the 19th century against the dikus (outsiders) popularly known as Birsa Ulgulan (tumult, rebellion). The movement targeted British officials, zamindars, and missionaries. One of the immediate effects of the movement emerged in the form of protectionary legislation (Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act) and later played an influential role in the making of Jharkhand. In the contemporary social and political landscape, the presence of Birsa Munda in the form of the built environment such as statue is indelible and offers an exciting opportunity to understand the new aesthetic turn. In particular, the author investigates two statues in Jharkhand. These statues that function as “sites of memory” play a significant role in political mobilisation and vote-bank politics. It also offers a possibility to understand the relationship between the state, elites and subalterns. The paper builds upon ethnographic materials collected during the fieldwork and devices a conceptual tool of “material-memory” to offer the specific role of Birsa’s memory as medium of doing memory politics.

Eliot Deutsch and the Aesthetic Turn

Eliot Deutsch and the Aesthetic Turn

La poética de la hipálage virgiliana en la poesía moderna: Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, Jorge Luis Borges y José Emilio Pacheco

El artículo estudia las aproximaciones a dos hipálages virgilianas, tacitae per amica silentia lunae (Aen.2.255) e ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram (Aen.6.268) en tres autores hispanoamericanos del siglo XX: el traductor de Virgilio, Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, y los literatos Jorge Luis Borges y José Emilio Pacheco. Para ello, se atenderá al estado de la crítica literaria y filológica de la obra virgiliana (Norden, Heinze) en la Alemania de inicios de siglo y al llamado “giro estético” efectuado por dicha crítica, un espíritu que compartirán los tres autores mencionados. La hipálage no es en Virgilio una figura literaria más, sino que adquiere una notable significación dentro de su obra poética, entre otras figuras como la metáfora o la metonimia. Atenderemos a la traducción al español de dichas figuras y a la forma en la que estos autores insertan los versos virgilianos en sus respectivos proyectos estéticos.