Aesthetics and the ordinary notes of being in Marcuse, Wynter, and Sharpe

In a world where defenses of capital and empire will go to any lengths to justify themselves and to ensure their successes, what justifies a concern with aesthetics? Would the philosopher better serve the cause of justice by centering politics and political theory over art and aesthetics?

In this talk, I invite Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetic theory into conversation with Sylvia Wynter’s Caribbean philosophy and literature and Christina Sharpe’s queer, Black, feminist, aesthetics to provide a creolized defense of aesthetics. Within a “miserable reality” still capable of radical transformation, where joy lives beside, amid, and in the afterlife of abject harm, Marcuse, Wynter, and Sharpe are all committed to the value of art. 

Furthermore, reading them together allows one to view how poetic forms of being are made possible by engagement with a radical practice of imagining which breaks with the limiting effects of the reality and performance principles within colonialist and capitalist orders. Additionally, these three theorists are committed to the truth of art that aligns with a modernist rather than a postmodernist understanding of truth and knowledge. 

In the end, by creolizing Marcuse’s aesthetics, I seek to extend the connections between Marcuse’s radical praxis and Africana and Caribbean thought, as dominant Marcusean scholars and readings have generally overlooked these intersections.

About the speaker 

Dr Jina Fast is the SHIFT Professor of Applied Ethics and the Common Good at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and women's and gender studies from Temple University. As a feminist epistemologist, and critical philosopher of race, her work centers theories produced by and through the experiences and work of marginalized peoples across disciplines. 

Dr. Fast's work has been published in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, Hypatia, and Atlantis: A Journal of Gender and Culture, among others. Her first book Decolonizing Existentialism and Phenomenology: The Liberation of Philosophies of Freedom and Identity was published in November, 2023 and she has two books slated for publication by the end of 2024, The Marcusean Mind and Creolizing Marcuse.

Link to event

This event is online via Zoom.

Contact

• Email: cgcp@soas.ac.uk