Aesthetics, Race, Nation

This course investigates the ties between aesthetics, race and nation. Racial and national identities are aesthetic artifacts-in-process. Conversely, aesthetic productions underwrite experiences of the proper, the proprietary, the intimate, the home, the public, the workplace, the global, and other determinants of identity and difference. What is the role of taste, objects, spatiality, affect, imagination, and bodily contact in delimiting the irrevocably malleable boundaries of subjects and collectives? How do aesthetic forms both help to create difference and curtail it? How do love, hate, and violence coagulate into aesthetic forms by which we inhabit social positions, relationships, and a sense of possibility? Readings by major figures in the history of aesthetics will be conjoined with contemporary cultural/philosophical writings, artworks, and other productions across media and traditions. Students will write a final research project on a theoretical question in connection with a cultural artifact of their own choosing.