Political Aesthetics ─ Culture, Critique and the Everyday

This work seeks to highlight that an understanding of aesthetic practices is essential to the analysis of politics and political processes.

If today, aesthetics has become a rather overused term, referring to a variety of historical periods and groups, even states of being (love, melancholy…), nonetheless its relevance as a connecting agent between individual, state and society remains strong. Placing it as a central theme for understanding processes of domination, contestation and transversal links highlights the mobilization of spaces, bodies and objects in a struggle for the exercise of power and the challenges to it. It is impossible to study historical shifts or systems of power without examining the mobilisation of aesthetic languages: of splendour and display, austerity, asceticism, minimalism or restraint.

In this book the concern is with the dynamics between the custodians of aesthetics and the dissenters, with the moment, and with change over time. This book approaches contemporary politics through the aesthetics of power and its practices: from the more formal and regulated presence of state power in the public space in the form of official buildings, commemorative monuments, to the aestheticisation of sacrifice in politics and judicial spectacles. The studies presented here promise to lead us further to deepening our understanding of the dynamics of political spaces and the politics of the aesthetic in contemporary politics.

Arundhati Virmani is an historian at the Centre Norbert Elias, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Marseille. Her works deal with the history of political culture in colonial and postcolonial India, in particular the forms and mechanisms of social aggregation, symbols and rituals of national sentiment, places and objects of memory.