Humanities, Provocateur

de Brinda Bose

"Humanities, Provocateur: Toward a Contemporary Political Aesthetics will 'occupy' the Humanities afresh in the contemporary, offering a set of speculations and conversations about a dissident aesthetics for these our times, which appear to be singularly out of joint. Where and how do we seek, find, and construct aesthetics that will both represent and resist these times? Is it to be found in an unstable aesthetics of being and becoming, ex-centric, in alienation and rupture in and of the arts, in un-belonging and discomfort, of glancing in, out and askance, of being excluded, excluding, or of excluding oneself? What would be a dissensual aesthetics of desire, melancholy, murder, quietism, exultation, suicide, irresponsibility, nihilism or death that would speak to, and for, our times? What can we recover and re-discover of the power of the Humanities - its seduction, allure, wonder, dream, fantasy and pleasure - in this renewed, revitalized occupation of lost and discarded spaces?."--