African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, edited by Catherine F. Botha

Abstract

An interdisciplinary philosophical approach akin to hermeneutics and phenomenology, somaesthetics was introduced by pragmatist philosopher Richard Schusterman (who is also Brill’s series editor) as “[t]he critical study and meliorative cultivation of how we experience and use the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning” (Schusterman 2012, 34). This volume’s editor, Catherine F. Botha, argues for “the significance of the corporeal” (p. 2) and states that “in its rejection of the somatophobia that characterises most philosophical traditions, somaesthetics aims to re-evaluate the human body and its role in the living of a fulfilled life” (p. 3). Botha highlights that this third volume in Brill’s Studies in Somaesthetics series is the first attempt to bring together original research on somaesthetics within African contexts (rather than Western or Eastern contexts). She positions Schusterman’s pragmatic focus on relativist social practices and political experimentation as ideally suitable to “specifically interrogating the possibilities of the contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa” (p. 2). Not being able to offer an informed critique of either somaesthetics as a philosophical approach, nor the volume’s contribution to the existing literature on somaesthetics, my focus in this review will be on its potential interest to an audience in the visual and performing arts.