JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM最新文献

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self-images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some of its tropes. My examples are the Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon's Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them.

This article argues that Zootopia, while positively exploring implicit racial bias, nonetheless leaves aside a huge swath of nonwhite viewers. By using the vehicle of fear that prey animals have for predators as a metaphor for race, its story primarily caters to white audiences and encourages them to consider what sorts of implications biased presumptions and predispositions might have on one's fellow creatures. Through the use of different epistemological and thematic twists, this movie drives home its point of showing the negative impacts that implicit racial biases may have, even as it sidelines many of its potential viewers.

The specific form of holocaust humor that I will address—as developed by comedians Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Rachel Bloom, Ilana Glazer, and Abbi Jacobson—is neither trivial nor trivializes the suffering of the Jews but rather can expose the complicity of our narratives about the holocaust with our own white indifference to the pervasive ruthlessness of American genocide against black communities and our failure to bear witness to the survival of certain genocidal logics from the past in the American present.

In this article, I explore some of the elements by which Muslim women who wear the hijab in the United States are managed so as to produce and distinguish “unruly” from “good” Muslim female citizens within the context of American liberalism. Unlike the French state, which has regulated both the hijab and niqab through national legislation, the American liberal framework utilizes a laissez-faire approach, which relies on a range of public and private institutions to determine acceptable public presentations of the liberal female subject. I refer to this form of management as “neoliberalism.” Neoliberal management works in conjunction with popular political discourses and domestic events in ways that alternately contract and expand the boundaries that allow “suitable Muslim women” in the public sphere.

This article proposes that one source of deep-rooted prejudices among peoples derives from their fundamental lifeways respectively as settled or peripatetic. Although the advantage in the present is clearly with settled, notably urban, peoples, that is no reason either to project an attitude of superiority into consideration of the past or to assume inherent superiority in the present. Building types characterize these fundamentally different lifeways, and settled peoples unthinkingly assume the superiority not only of their own building types but of a small subset thereof conceived as architecture, conceived as the work, principally, of the mind rather than the hand. This article proposes a fundamental historical taxonomy on grounds of function—the provision of shelter—of buildings of all types employed by both settled and peripatetic peoples, from tents to temples. Although the antagonism between settled and peripatetic peoples, based on different conceptions of the land, rests on their fundamental differences in lifeways, including building practices, those differences are often entangled with racial considerations.

In the history of Chinese philosophy, Mozi calls music a “waste of resources,” considering it an aristocratic extravagance that does not benefit the everyday people. In its defense, Confucians highlight music's moral and metaphysical qualities, arguing that music aids in moral cultivation and that music's form mimics the structure of reality. The aim of this article is to show that Korean philosophers provide yet another reason to think music is important. Music, and art in general, was used to express a national identity at a time Korean philosophers were beginning to develop their own aesthetic consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A cultural movement called Joseonpoong (조선풍), “Joseon wind,” marked a shift away from Sinocentrism and toward Korea's own unique values and practices. The new attempt to justify art's value apart from its relationship to morality or metaphysics set Joseon thinkers apart from their Chinese predecessors. Using art for identity expression allowed the Koreans to reconceive art's value while Sinocentric cosmological and cultural views were being challenged with the introduction of Western knowledge. Art also became a tool for reversing hermeneutic injustice as new artistic practices and standards allowed the Koreans to meaningfully engage with previously neglected aspects of their lived lives.