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During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico's present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation. Whereas ecocritical studies have often focused on art's evidentiary role—its ability to visualize and prove the urgency of environmental damage—author Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites the artists under consideration is their use of more hypothetical, uncertain representational modes, or "subjunctive aesthetics." In English, the subjunctive is a grammatical mode that articulates the imagined, desired, and possible. In the Spanish language, it is even more widely used to express doubts, denials, value judgments, and emotions. Each chapter of Subjunctive Aesthetics takes up one of these modalities to examine how Mexican artists, writers, and filmmakers activate approaches to the planet not just as it is, but as it could be or should be.
Subjunctive Aesthetics argues for the importance of ecocritical approaches within the field of Mexican Studies. While environmental historians of Mexico have been leading the charge in terms of foregrounding the nonhuman as a legitimate object of analysis, Mexican cultural studies is just beginning to do so. This monograph engages with established and up-and-coming Latin American ecocritical scholars who argue that Latin America offers an important corrective to Anglocentric approaches to the Anthropocene by foregrounding colonialism and empire. Studies indicate that Mexicans are more worried about climate change than any other global issue, more anxious about natural disasters than any other quotidian threat (including crime), and that suicide rates have risen along with temperatures. These fears are grounded in reality: in the last twenty years, Mexico issued more than 2,000 extreme weather warnings linked to hydrometeorological events, and ranked in the top ten countries in terms of absolute economic losses caused by (un)natural disasters. Mexico is also one of the deadliest countries in the world for environmental activists: in 2018 alone, twenty-one defenders of the land were murdered, and many others criminalized or intimidated. Pervasive social anxiety in Mexico about ongoing and future climate change is reflected in the outpouring of eco-cultural production over the past decade, a body of work that has yet to be comprehensively studied. The exponential explosion of cultural responses to climate change is not limited to any one genre: Mexican poets like Karen Villeda and Isabel Zapata have thematized extinction, sci-fi writer Alberto Chimal recently published a dystopian young adult climate fiction, and performance artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo has created works that contest extractivism's murderous tactics. Subjunctive Aesthetics brings together these artists and others to collate a diverse constellation of Mexican cultural responses to climate change that index the multifaceted nature of this crisis. Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites this array is the way in which it deploys the subjunctive--not the what is, but the what if--in order to disrupt current paradigms of energy consumption and envision a more just and sustainable planetary future.
Augusto Boal's workshops and theatre exercises are renowned throughout the world for their life-changing effects. At last this major director, practitioner, and author of many books on community theatre speaks out about the subjects most important to him – the practical work he does with diverse communities, the effects of globalization, and the creative possibilities for all of us.
Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson. The stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance. Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice.
David Brown is a widely-respected theologian who initially made his mark in analytic discussions of Christian doctrine such as the Trinity. With the publication of Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (1999) his career entered a distinctly new phase, focused on theology and the arts. Four related volumes followed, dealing with discipleship, art and icons, place and space, the body, music, metaphor, drama, and popular culture. According to Brown, the fundamental thesis underlying all five volumes is that both natural and revealed theology are in crisis, and the only way out is to give proper attention to the cultural embeddedness of both. This current volume is the first attempt to assess the significance of this remarkable series, and its contributors include some of the most prominent philosophers, theologians, biblical and literary scholars writing today. Aside from its distinguished interdisciplinary line-up, a distinctive feature is sustained consideration of Brown's work on popular culture. It thus provides an exciting and substantial treatment of theology, aesthetics, and culture.
For most of the twentieth century, Auguste Comte, a controversial but highly influential nineteenth-century figure, and his vast treatises on positive philosophy, politics and religion were disregarded and largely ignored. More recently, however, Comte’s life and writings have been reexamined together with the project of social reform to which his intellectual labors were devoted, producing a much more complicated picture of his thought and its significance. The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte—with ten new critical essays by leading Comte scholars, sociologists, intellectual historians, social theorists and philosophers—aims to further this reexamination while also providing a multifaceted introduction to Comte’s thought and to current discussion about him. The essays also examine Comte’s relation to a multiplicity of other thinkers, and his place more generally in the formation and legacy of modern Western thought.
Chronicles the development of dramatic writing and performance from the time South Africa was established to post-apartheid. Investigates the impact of sketches and manifestos, and the oral preservation of scripts that could not be written.
Philosophers have considered questions raised by the nature of art, of beauty, and critical appreciation since ancient times, and the discipline of aesthetics has a long tradition that stretches from Plato to the present.
In the field of aesthetic experiences, presence must be seen as mental activities such as attention, curiosity, and participation. The mere physical ‘being-there’ guarantees no aesthetic responses to artistic or natural appearances. When aesthetics became part of the discourse in eighteenth-century Enlightenments philosophy, the beholder was the centre of interest: how observations turned into aesthetic experiences. In this book, the spectator, reader, listener and viewer have again become the focus of scholarly attention, replacing the century-long dominance of the artwork as exclusive object of aesthetics. In the light of such historical observations, the book develops central aspects of an aesthetics of presence, and introduces, interfoliated with cases of aesthetic experiences in arts and theatre, cities and nature, new parameters of presence. Perceiving, playing, placing and performing are explored and systematised here as theoretical cornerstones of a renewed ‘Aesthetics of Presence’.
The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large. By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary.