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Srl | Item |
1 |
ID:
152110
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Summary/Abstract |
Though aesthetics is commonly understood as the reflection on art, and especially beauty, it is a broader concern, captured by the term’s etymology in the Greek ‘aisthesis’, referring to perception and sense impressions. Aesthetics, though, is not simply a passive process, of how the outer world strikes the mind, but an interactive one, which, through our selective attention, we attenuate the complexities of reality. Aesthetics is about the formation of the objects that constitute our social milieu, those we invest in to give rhythm, order and unity to our lives. Aesthetics is also, vitally, about the formation of the self, about how we constitute ourselves as objects in relation to the world.
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2 |
ID:
083985
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3 |
ID:
144167
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Summary/Abstract |
India’s celebrated ‘arrival on the global stage’ as a desirable ‘emerging market’ for global investors signals the spectacular moment that is said to have ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. If the notion of arrival anticipates the long-awaited acceleration in the pace of history, it also harnesses a euphoric India to the limitless future promised by the new. In this special issue, we set our focus on the aesthetics of arrival that signal novelty, visibility and celebration of post-reform India within and outside the nation. We ask how novelty is manufactured and experienced when the majority of the population remains excluded from new India. The answer probably lies in the way in which this other India is signified as the past, as ‘old India’ that holds back the nation. The novelty, we propose, is not only experienced in the promise of the future, but also in the aesthetic force of the promise to overcome a humiliating past, tainted by colonialism, in order to realise a truer and more timeless ‘new’ India
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4 |
ID:
068363
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5 |
ID:
138911
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Summary/Abstract |
Mirza Gholamreza's status in Persian calligraphy and the artistic quality of his works is well acknowledged both in Iran and abroad. Many of the calligraphic pieces of Mirza Gholamreza (d. 1887) are close in appearance to siahmashq and on the surface can hardly be distinguished from ordinary calligraphic studies, so much so that some critics have come to call him “the siahmashq nevis.” This article is an attempt, to investigate the aesthetics of Mirza Gholamreza's calligraphic art with reference to these so-called siahmashq works. By analyzing some of these works it will be shown that they are not siahmashq, i.e. calligraphic exercises, in the ordinary sense. Far from it, these pieces are perfect examples of high-art, demonstrating Mirza Gholamreza's full understanding as well as ability to use intrinsic plastic features of the nast'aliq form. Mirza's work is therefore the forerunner of what, more than a century later, became a major strain in modern Iranian painting known as naqqashi-khat (script-painting).
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6 |
ID:
117870
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Publication |
2012.
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Summary/Abstract |
The ways that financialization has contributed to the technocratic and antipolitical management of economies have become ever more evident in the wake of the financial crisis that commenced in the autumn of 2007. This bracketing and suspension of politics occurs in various ways but significantly, it does so through the obscuring of work as a moment of economic life. If economics has been complicit in this antipolitics, can an aesthetic approach to financialization shed light on how work is rendered invisible? This article analyzes four short film clips all distributed through YouTube to show not only how their visual and narrative elements organize subjectivities for an antipolitics of finance but also to find in the popular aesthetic a different "distribution of the sensible" that permits moments of suspension or rupture that can politicize financialized subjectivity and begin to recover a politics of work.
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7 |
ID:
152109
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Summary/Abstract |
Fifteen years ago, Roland Bleiker’s profound and influential article outlined a research agenda for those who take seriously the nature of aesthetic encounters with the social world. A rich and sophisticated literature addressing theoretical and methodological aspects of visual research in IR has emerged through the ‘aesthetic turn’ in International Relations (IR) theory.1 Efforts to theorise, or represent, global politics that are inspired by an aesthetic approach do not seek to produce the ‘most accurate’ theory or representation. ‘Approaching the study of IR with an aesthetic sensibility encourages scholars to pay analytical attention to affect rather than reason, judgement rather than fact, sensation rather than intellectualism’.
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8 |
ID:
172224
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Summary/Abstract |
Can the Indian manuscript and manuscript library be art? In what follows, I reflect on this question by examining a set of photographs I created for an art project called Manuscriptistan. I explain what it has meant for me to aestheticise Indian manuscript libraries and manuscripts, and I offer some insights about why it is important for scholars to bring sensual, spatial and artistic awareness to the things with which, and the spaces in which, they do their research.
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9 |
ID:
152112
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Summary/Abstract |
North Korea is an illustrative limit case for exploring contributions of an aesthetic approach to ‘decentering’ IR and taking seriously non-Western subject positions and agencies.1 North Korea is an international problem of human rights, poverty and security that sits across an enemy line, a line where empathy ends and the terrible begins. There are good reasons to condemn, hate and close down our ability to imagine subject positions – the source of life – across this enemy line. Here we can point to its notorious labour reeducation camps and frequent political purges and executions.
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10 |
ID:
071233
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11 |
ID:
164496
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Summary/Abstract |
Over the last 30 years, post-structuralist, feminist and other IR theorists have asked questions of the ways in which discourses on sovereignty seek to foreclose political possibility. To do so, they have advanced a decentralised, contested, incomplete and relational understanding of politics that presupposes some sort of intersubjective agency, however fragmented. There is one site, however, that appears to confound this line of argument insofar as it is commonly understood to exemplify an entirely non-relational, anti-political ‘desolation’: the concentration camp. Drawing on feminist theory to establish the terms of an aesthetic mode of ‘interruption’, this article will identify a compelling challenge to this position in a comic book drawn by Horst Rosenthal, a German–Jewish detainee at Gurs in Vichy, France, who was later killed at Auschwitz–Birkenau. Rosenthal’s piece will be read as an ‘aesthetic interruption’ that mounts a powerful critique of the logic underpinning his concentrationary experience, and in so doing demonstrates one way in which (to however painfully limited a degree) the political might be ‘brought back in’ to discussions about sovereign power.
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12 |
ID:
121104
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Publication |
2013.
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Summary/Abstract |
A new type of civil society movement led by the urban middle class has grown with increasing economic liberalization, one that aims to eliminate 'filth', including garbage, slums, and street stalls, from the city's public space and to create a 'world-class' city. These movements have been critically analyzed as a phenomenon representing a new India aspiring to progress based on consumerism and pleasure at the cost of the poor. 'Fight the Filth', organized by a Mumbai English-language tabloid, is one campaign of this type. This paper aims to provide a new perspective to understand these controversial movements by focusing on the forms and aesthetics of this campaign. It illustrates the demands on the middle class in public culture, both to catch up with global India's new consumer aesthetics and to be proper citizens responsible for the society at large, and considers how the middle class is coping with this.
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13 |
ID:
184050
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Summary/Abstract |
Populists have lately been at the forefront of securitisation processes, yet little attention has been paid to the relationship between populism and securitisation. This paper investigates the role of securitisation in populism, exploring how the populist mode of securitising differs from traditional securitisation processes. It argues that securitisation is inherently embedded in populism which embodies a particular style of securitisation with a distinct set of discursive and aesthetic repertoires. The populist invocation of societal security and their claim to defend the fundamentally precarious identity of ‘the endangered people’ necessitate an unceasing construction of new threats. Aiming to discredit ‘elitist’ securitisation processes, populism invests in a specific construction of the referent object, the securitising actor and their relationship to the audience. The populist securitising style also carries a distinctive aesthetic centred on ‘poor taste’, sentimental ordinariness and unprofessionalism, examining which can widen our understanding of the aesthetics of security.
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14 |
ID:
171304
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Summary/Abstract |
Sa’dia Rehman’s Lotah Stories was an art installation that was exhibited in the bathrooms of Queens Museum of Art in New York during the 2005 Fatal Love show, the first exhibition on South Asian American art in a major venue. Given its unusual placement outside the white cube, one’s encounter with Lotah Stories is jarring. Moreover, Rehman’s crass subject matter incites carnivalesque laughter. This article argues that Rehman’s aesthetics give form to the dissent of play; by situating Rehman within the age of identity art and the emergence of South Asian diasporic art from the 1990s onwards, I maintain that attention to play as a political aesthetic can reshape the way we see difference.
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15 |
ID:
108788
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Publication |
2011.
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Summary/Abstract |
Ouchida Keiya's Chikatetsu Hiroba (Underground Plaza, 1970), a film from the Japanese underground cinema movement, documents the gathering of 'folk guerrillas' (activists and student protestors) at the underground plaza linking the west and east exits of the vast Shinjuku railway station in February 1969. This essay analyses their protests by highlighting their apparent search for a new performative praxis, amidst evidence of complicated broken threads, misplaced emotions and disconnections between politics and action. Through occupying and restoring other uses of the space, I argue that the protestors desired to remake the city as a forum for ideological confrontation and revolutionary aesthetics.
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16 |
ID:
171301
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Summary/Abstract |
India’s ongoing legal movement to decriminalise ‘gay sex’ has been witness to the simultaneous sanitisation of queer spaces. From Pride parades declaring ‘no nanga naach, no flamboyance’ to quotidian policing of excessive dress and gestures, there is a growing emphasis on respectability that stages queerness in the private rather than the public domain. The good homosexual subject is increasingly at odds with public gestures, performances and dresses that might seem too excessive, too flamboyant, perhaps too queer. But what might it mean to sit with the bawdy gestures enacted by kothi, hijra and MSM persons in Prides, in offices, in public spaces and in daily life? This essay makes a case for theorising the fabulousness of gender and sexual minorities in India, pushing homosexuality beyond the registers of legality and epidemiology. By examining the political implications of excessive and risky aesthetic practices, it argues that what is at stake is not only a centring of aesthetics in larger considerations of queer politics, but also the larger work of fabulation: the reinvention of what meanings queer subjectivity can take on in public spaces in India.
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17 |
ID:
166888
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Summary/Abstract |
This article explores affective, embodied encounters between military and civilian bodies in the everyday as choreography of war. It argues that by paying attention to the intersecting political sphere of bodies, affect and movement – through the metaphor of ‘dance’ – we are not only able to understand how security operates as a logic reproducing the militarisation of the everyday, but also able to identify a representational gap, an aesthetic politics, potentially useful for resistance to such practices normalising war in the everyday. It draws on two British examples of where military moves disrupt civilian spaces in the everyday: an arts project commemorating the Battle of the Somme, and a football game taking place during Remembrance week. Through embodied choreographies of war in the everyday, dance is used as a metaphor to understand militarisation as an example of feeling Everyday IR. Thus, dance is useful to ‘see’ the politics of Everyday IR, but also to understand, to feel and possibly to resist the politics of normalisation of war in the everyday. This is one example of how feeling Everyday IR offers alternative openings into political puzzles of security logics informing war as practice.
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18 |
ID:
110209
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Publication |
2012.
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Summary/Abstract |
Advanced capitalism is at a historical conjuncture in which aestheticization and financialization combine to intensify and deepen the 'cult of capitalism' at the expense of economic imagination. International Political Economy (IPE) is, however, not only poorly equipped to understand the implications of these closely linked transformations, it also avoids considering them by shunning aesthetics. To contribute to the rejuvenation of economic imagination, IPE must explicitly aim at both understanding these processes and their confluences, and engaging with them. Rescue cannot come from orthodox IPE because of its embededdness in the reified 'Kantian Desire', which promotes the neglect of recognition in aesthetics and the complexities of human agency under financialization. Critical IPE is more apt at grasping related struggles, which it has shown in for instance research on the financialization of everyday life. Nevertheless, its engagement with aesthetics remains modest and inadequate. Critical IPE concerned with financialization should see it as one of its core tasks to turn to and engage with aesthetics as a means to contribute to critical economic imagination. To this end, the article outlines a critical IPE approach to aesthetics, inspired by Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
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19 |
ID:
144363
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Summary/Abstract |
This paper presents an ethnographic study of a redevelopment controversy in Delhi's old city. It considers the perspectives of traders, hawkers, politicians and officials on the proposed revamping of the Meena Bazaar. The paper illustrates how hermeneutic and aesthetic dimensions suffuse public and political life in India. Specifically, sincere intentions, evoked in speech and performance, are seen as a prerequisite of public presentation and as a locus of interpretive scrutiny. In an ambiguous and indeterminate milieu, promises and motives are probingly assessed, often in ironic and dramaturgical form. The paper foregrounds the ‘hermeneutics of the bazaar’, an interpretive sensitivity to intentionality, and ‘structured sincerity’, the efficacy, and reflexive steering, of performed conviction.
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20 |
ID:
153011
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Summary/Abstract |
Examining the visual tactics of framing flowing water in landscape painting and riparian architecture in Braj, a pilgrimage centre in North India where the god Krishna is believed to have spent his youth, the essay foregrounds a new conception of hydroaesthetics that emerged with the onset of the Little Ice Age (c. 1550–1850), a climatic period marked by catastrophic droughts and famines in South Asia. An engagement with the hydroaesthetics of beholding the river Yamuna's passage through Braj, the essay argues, brings to the forefront a reciprocal relationship between artistic practices based on a theological aesthetic of venerating the natural environment and ecological calamities. In doing so, the essay attempts to delineate a possible methodology for an ecological art history.
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