Political Aesthetics Culture, Critique and the Everyday [Hardcover]

Political Aesthetics highlights the complex and ambiguous connections of aesthetics with social, cultural and political experiences in contemporary societies. If today aesthetics seems a rather overused term, mixing a variety of historical realities and complex personal states of being, its relevance as a connecting agent between individual, state and society is stronger than ever.

The actual context of political and economic crisis generates new relations between official imposed aesthetics and the resistance and critiques they trigger. Considered beyond the poles of power and protest, the book examines how traditional or innovative artistic practices may acquire unexpected capacities of subversion. It nourishes the current debate around the new political stakes of aesthetics as an inviolable right of ordinary citizens, an essential element of empowerment and agency in a democratic every day.

It will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, political culture and political aesthetics, as well as critical sociology and history. It will also be useful for some broad courses in media studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

IntroductionArundhati Virmani  Aesthetics in Political Culture Chapter 1. Narrating the Nation: Murals and Tapestry in the Indian and South African Parliaments Shirin Rai and Rachel Johnson  Chapter 2. The Aesthetics of Sacrifice in Indian Political Culture Arundhati Virmani  Chapter 3. The Politics of Aesthetics: Mussolini and Fascist Italy Simonetta Falasca Zamponi Power of Aesthetical critique Chapter 4. The Aesthetic Politics of the Techno Movement in France 1990-2010  Jean-Christophe SevinChapter 5. Aesthetics as Critique: A Photographic Inquiry into the Mafil“u