Difference Aesthetics Makes

Chuh Kandice Chuh

Description

In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls "illiberal humanism" instead of around the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing that the liberal humanities contribute to the reproduction of the subjugation that accompanies liberalism's definition of the human, Chuh argues that instead of defending the humanities, as has been widely called for in recent years, we should radically remake them. Chuh proposes that the work of artists and writers like Lan Samantha Chang, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allan deSouza, Monique Truong, and others brings to bear ways of being and knowing that delegitimize liberal humanism in favor of more robust, capacious, and worldly senses of the human and the humanities. Chuh presents the aesthetics of illiberal humanism as vital to the creation of sensibilities and worlds capable of making life and lives flourish.

Sujets

• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781478002383
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The DiFerence Aesthetics Makes

This page intentionally left blank

The DiFerence Aesthetics Makes

On the Humanities “After Man”

Kandice Chuh

duke university press Durham and London 2019

© 2019 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper∞ Typeset in Whitman and Helvetica Neue by Copperline Books

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chuh, Kandice, [date]author. Title: The difference aesthetics makes : on the humanities “after man” / Kandice Chuh. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:lccn2018033901 (print) lccn2018053991 (ebook) isbn9781478002383 (ebook) isbn9781478000709 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn9781478000921 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects:lcsh: Aesthetics—Political aspects. | American literature—Political aspects. | Art, Modern—21st century— Political aspects—United States. | Politics and culture. | Literature—Study and teaching (Higher) | Humanism— Study and teaching (Higher) | Eurocentrism. Classification:lccbh301.p64 (ebook) | lccbh301.p64c482019 (print) |ddc111/.85—dc23 lcrecord available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033901

Cover art: Allan deSouza, “He gazed into the liquid darkness in which desires drowned, from where the body’s delicious pains emerged.” Photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Talwar Gallery, New York.

For Josh, Cole, and Georgia, With love.

This page intentionally left blank

The struggle of our new millennium will be between the ongoing im- perative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., West- ern bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. —w y n t ers y lv i a , “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/ Truth/Freedom”

Our contemporary moment is so replete with assumptions that free- dom is made universal through liberal political enfranchisement and the globalization of capitalism that it has become difficult to write or imagine alternative knowledges, to act on behalf of alternative projects or communities. Within this context, it is necessary to act within but to think beyond our received humanist tradition and, all the while, to imagine a much more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now, in which what is foreclosed as unknowable is forever satu- rating the “what-can-be-known.” We are left with the project of visual- izing, mourning, and thinking “other humanities” within the received genealogy of “the human.” —l is a low e, “The Intimacies of Four Continents”

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes—all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criti- cism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms. —m ichel fouc au lt, “The Masked Philosopher”

This page intentionally left blank

Pedagogies of Liberal Humanism

xi

preface

Contents

1

51

Introduction Difference Aesthetics Makes The

122

74

Conclusion

131

175

index

Postscript

bibliography

notes

On the Humanities “After Man”

126

98

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 2

159

Chapter 1

Mis/Taken Universals

Making Sense Otherwise

26

Knowledge under Cover