Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination

Igniting political power through the lens of art and the imagination

Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination investigates the erosion of meaningful political action in today’s world. Gathering writings from an array of scholars, editor Juan Meneses asks: can an aesthetic theory of postpolitics help us understand and counteract the most insidious processes of depoliticization?

The contributors to this volume explore how the aesthetic imagination can play a crucial role in reenvisioning key political elements, including governance, agency, rights, and responsibility. With a survey of various artistic mediums—film, dance, music, literature, and digital media—the essays illustrate how the aesthetic can reveal ways to breathe new life into the work of emancipatory politics. Reclaiming the arts and humanities as vital to political life, the contributors revisit but also move beyond the social sciences’ central focus on neoliberalism and public administration to address other topics such as tech-capitalism, race, environmental violence, and patriarchy.

Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination argues for a conscious deployment of aesthetics to resist political anesthesia and promote a more just society, underscoring the role of the imagination in political engagement and change.

Contributors: Jacquelyn Arcy, U of Wisconsin–Parkside; Christopher Breu, Illinois State U; Stephen Charbonneau, Florida Atlantic U; Eric Lemmon, Webster U; Robert P. Marzec, Purdue U; Allison Page, Rutgers U–Camden; Matthew Scully, U of Lausanne; Eric Swyngedouw, U of Manchester; Sherryl Vint, U of California, Riverside.

Juan Meneses is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is author of Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent (Minnesota, 2019).

Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Sensing the Postpolitical

Juan Meneses

1. The Infrastructural Aesthetic: Materialist Politics in Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel

Christopher Breu

2. Irrational Exuberance: The Politics of Start-up Futurism

Sherryl Vint

3. Un violador en tu camino: Reimagining the Political through Mediated Feminist Street Performance

Jacquelyn Arcy and Allison Page

4. Thinking Jacques Rancière with Ursula K. Le Guin: Aesthetics and Politics in a Postpolitical Age 

Robert P. Marzec

5. Wayward Possibilities: Errant Black Women and the Intimacies of Freedom

Matthew Scully

6. False Specters of the Political: Revisitation, Digital Documentary Vernacular, and the Postpolitical after January 6

Stephen Charbonneau

7. Dissensus, Refusal, Participatory Music: Negation and Rupture in Crowd in C

Eric Lemmon

8. A Haunted Present: Postpolitics, Nuclear Waste, and the Colonization of the Future

Juan Meneses

Afterword: Between Two Endings, or Prolegomena for Another End

Erik Swyngedouw

Contributors

Index