During the classical period, aesthetics was an inward-facing field, not concerned with the socioeconomic reality of everyday life. However, art has always flourished across societies as a direct product of the very realities of caste, class, and gender that aesthetics long ignored. As a result, aesthetics as a keyword in the humanities stands at a crossroads today. Eschewing definitions, this volume attempts to explore what aesthetics can be, to deploy the dissipation of classical aesthetics into a reconstituted toolkit of critical terms—anger, shock, beauty, form, praxis, affect.
During the classical period, aesthetics was an inward-facing field, not concerned with the socioeconomic reality of everyday life. However, art has always flourished across societies as a direct product of the very realities of caste, class, and gender that aesthetics long ignored. As a result, aesthetics as a keyword in the humanities stands at a crossroads today. Eschewing definitions, this volume attempts to explore what aesthetics can be, to deploy the dissipation of classical aesthetics into a reconstituted toolkit of critical terms—anger, shock, beauty, form, praxis, affect.
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