Humanities, Provocateur

Towards a Contemporary Political Aesthetics

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• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2021
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9789388414937
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

This highly original collection is a far cry from the demand on the literary humanities to offer the soothing hum of theory to a world of breaks, crises and pain. Instead, it exemplifies a way ahead for the critical humanities….
-Arjun Appadurai, New York University

'Doing the Humanities' comes to life in this passionate, provocative set of experiments in descriptive poetics. Failure, fantasy, freefall are reconceived as forms of aesthetic achievement across the creative arts.…
-Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford

....This timely volume inspires a collective undertaking to learn 'to do' the humanities through the untimeliness of a work of art. A humanities that remains attentive to this form of techné will prove indispensable to remaking the world in the aftermath of a pandemic.
-Premesh Lalu, University of the Western Cape

….exhilarating in the democratic breadth of its interests, the emotional fervour of its commitments and its yoking of systemic criticism to the work of poetic language.
-Helen Small, University of Oxford

How can the humanities make an intervention in such a time as this, when life as we have known it hangs in pandemic balance since the spring of 2020-and when contagion calls for distancing and isolation, while loneliness cries out for the solace of touch? Perhaps only by being, at once, fearless, critical, sorrowing, exultant, enraged, intimate.

Humanities, Provocateur brings you fourteen essays and two creative pieces by established as well as younger scholars and writers from America, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa and South Asia, in a bracing invitation to a freefall of reading. They travel from classical literatures and philosophy to twentieth-century writing, cinema and critical-imaginative thinking, grouped whimsically around a set of provocations-Gleaning, Perforation, Caprice, Paraphernalia, Descent, Flux, Flesh, Ephemera-and welcome you to argue, to cherish or to distrust. Taking sharp, sparkling twists and turns in thought and style, this eclectic collection of writings incites you to be intellectually adventurous and destitute at the same time. And, invoking Dante, to never be afraid, for our fate is our gift.

INDEX

A

abstract art, 51 (Expressionism); see also Minimalism, Plato, 53–54, 57, 72, 102, 157, 180

actor, 283, 294, 307 (figure of); see also Sartre, Jean Paul

Adonis, 250, 266–274, 276, 279n9, 279n10; see also death/mortality

Adorno, Theodor W., 266, 280

Aesthete, 76 (as self-identity); see also allegory, Genet, Jean, 130 (aesthetics)

Affect, 117, 118 (affective register), 122 (relation), 152 (feminist), 206, 220, 243n17, 245, 248, 256, 272, 278, 320; see also Jameson, Fredric, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky

Agamben, Giorgio, 4–6, 35n2, 35n3, 36n4

Taste, 296n6

The Adventure, 5

Ahmed, Sara, 156, 158n3, 241n1, 255

AIDS, 22–25 (epidemic), 175, 250

Alighieri, Dante, 1–3, 7, 10, 33

Aljafari, Kamal, 180–184, 186–190

Allegory, 77, 233

Almadhoun, Ghayath, 173–176

Alvarez, Al, 25 (study of suicide); see also suicide, AIDS, and Wilde, Oscar

Amiran, Eyal, 176n1

Anomaly, 67 (shift of history), 200

Antiquity, 58

Apter, Emily S., 237, 244

Arabic, 266, 267 (poetry), 269; 272 (intellectualism), 273–276 (poetic aesthetics), 278n2, 279n6, 280n12

Archive, 157, 172, 180, 233 (of colonialism), 278, 293

Arendt, Hannah, 190

Aristotle, 46–47, 49, 171

Artaud, Antonin, 282–288, 291–295, 296n1, 296n4, 297n9, 297n11

Artifice, 42, 46, 48 (one who invokes), 75, 21, 5; see also Winterson, Jeanette

Artist, 42 (figure of), 43 (Chinese), 44–47 (role of), 53–57 (frame), 58–60, 61n3, 85 (as provocateur), 97, 98 (as outsider); see also liminality, 99, 101, 104 (African-Americanvernacular artists), 130, 132, 140, 146, 152 (as queer), 220 (distance from art), 283 (as a professional)

Artlessness, 59, 239

Aryan, 175 (race)

Assemblage, 75, 102, 104 (artwork), 120, 181

asylum seeker,182, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Brinda Bose
• Gleaning
• Plato and Proust, Bedfellows: ‘Concept’ and ‘Idea’ from the Classical to the Modern
• Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre: Writing in Resistance and the Practice of Theory
• Thinking with Cinema: Mani Kaul Reading Deleuze
• Perforation
• If the Outsider Is Deeply Within
• Dissident Poetics, Experimental Excess: Jaakko Yli-Juonikas’ Finnish Novel Neuromaani
• Declassing Art: Manik Bandyopadhyay and Communist Aesthetics in India
• Caprice
• ‘Vulva’s School’: Towards a Provisional Pedagogy
• Paraphernalia
• Weaponisation of the Body in Goldman, Blair and Almadhoun
• Freeing the Image and Cinematic Justice: Non-Partitioned Aesthetics in Kamal Aljafari’s Recollection
• Descent
• The Homosexual and His Future (Cather, Clementi and Crisp)
• Sapphic Lineages: Or, Notes for a Queer-Feminist Poetics
• Flux
• Translation’s Dissidence: Miraji becomes Sappho
• Is There a Homosexual in the Text?
• Flesh
• This City, ‘Stinking Corpse’: Adonis’s Poetics of Modernity and Death
• Eating Dissidence of Antonin Artaud: Towards a Poor Aesthetics
• Ephemera
• Nocturnals (A Reminiscence)
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index