Beautiful Democracy
eBook - PDF

Beautiful Democracy

Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Beautiful Democracy

Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era

About this book

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, "I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club." Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking.

Beautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

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Yes, you can access Beautiful Democracy by Russ Castronovo in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Illustrations
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction: Aesthetics and the Anarchy of Global Culture
  5. 1. Flowers and Billy Clubs: The Beauty and Danger of Ethical Citizenship
  6. 2. American Literature Internationale: Translation, Strike, and the Time of Political Possibility
  7. 3. Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Form, and Aesthetics
  8. 4. “Bombs of Laughter”: Motion Pictures, Mass Art, and Universal Language
  9. 5. Geo-Aesthetics: Fascism, Globalism, and Frank Norris
  10. Afterword
  11. Notes
  12. Works Cited
  13. Index