Materiality, Race, and Speculative Aesthetics

The papers in this forum on Spaces and Politics of Aesthetics share a concern with analyzing relationships between politics and aesthetics in ways that question humanist, anthropocentric logics underpinning dominant aesthetic regimes of power. They do so by foregrounding more-than-human materialities and critical analyses of race and colonial power. In this introduction, we begin by routing debates around spaces and politics of aesthetics through post-humanist, new-materialist, and post-colonial trajectories. We also highlight theoretical reference points that animate many of the contributions to the forum, focusing on the aesthetics of disruption in Glissant, Rancière, and Benjamin. We then move on to guide the reader along two different routes through the collection, focusing first on material aesthetics, and then on aesthetic regimes of race.