Aesthetic Anxiety

Abstract

This editors’ issue of Fabrications is primarily concerned with the anxieties aroused by migration. Aesthetic Anxiety, as described and dissected in this issue, refers to both the prevalent anxieties connected with migrant experiences of inhabitation, as well the anxieties of state protection. The theme may at first invoke aesthetic theory or critical theories related to the rise of postmodern anti-aesthetics in architecture and art, a theme explored in Architecture and Ugliness (by Wouter Van Acker and Thomas Mical, review in this issue). The theme will suggest to others an engagement with critical cultural theories. For the authors included here joining “anxiety” to “aesthetic” raises concerns related to architecture as cultural production, and how diaspora aesthetics challenge conceptions of culture or cultural particularity. Diaspora aesthetics and its interest in everyday life and actual lived social processes draws on theories that challenge “taken-for-granted” framings precisely because the diasporic is a trans-cultural and trans-national concept and serves as metaphor to rethink national boundaries of aesthetic production. The collective implication of the work presented here under the banner of Aesthetic Anxiety is that an architecture of migration involves aesthetic production and that such production disrupts the visual imaginary of national cultures. The theme aims to expand the aesthetic field of reference by shifting its focus. Informed by key theoretical developments in cultural studies and the social sciences – notably those connected with the work and legacy of Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu and James Clifford – architectural historians have revised their approach to architectural historiography. Gülsüm Baydar’s theoretical reflection on cultural particularity mobilises a critique of conventional, canonical framings and their systematic dependence on architectural categorisation. Anthony King’s work revises architecture within the rise of globalisation, and outlines ways to analyse ethno-burbs and their links tomigration histories. Two key anthologies –Drifting: Architecture andMigrancy (Cairns 2004) and Ethnoarchitecture and the politics of migration (Lozanovska 2016) outline the breadth of the field and highlight key research areas. Why “anxiety”? Migration gives rise to fears about security and territory revealing ways that diversity, identity and cultural production are entangled with protective narratives of the nation-state. Aesthetic judgements of migrant architecture are key to this fear. In the late 1980s, published during the heyday of multicultural policy in Australia, Judith Vulker proposed topics for debate FABRICATIONS 2020, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 149–152 https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2020.1757930