Displacement does not only have an effect on groups' and individuals' ways of relating to their identity and their past but the knowledge and experience of it also has an impact on its representation. Looking at films that represent the experience of displacement in relation to Turkey's minorities, Aesthetics of Displacement argues that there is a particular aesthetic continuity among the otherwise unrelated films. Ozlem Koksal focuses on films that bring taboo issues concerning the repression of minorities into visibility, arguing that the changing political and social conditions determine not only the types of stories told but also the ways in which these stories are told. Focusing on aesthetic and narrative continuities, the films discussed include Ararat, Waiting for the Clouds and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia among others. Each film is examined in light of major historical event(s) and their context (political and social) as well as the impact these events had on the construction of both minority and Turkish identity.
This study is a new exploration of Lahiri’s fiction through the lens of postmodern aesthetics with reference to the main text The Lowland and the secondary text The Namesake. The Lowland is a narrative of home, displacement and a vague attempt of resettlement in a new world, yet the prime objective of this thesis is to explore how the desire to break with the barriers of tragic past and seeking survival in another world gives a new perspective of Diaspora. The Lowland and The Namesake explore the aesthetics of displacement, rather than touching upon the pains of displacement and dislocation. It is not the existence in the new world which causes the disaster of individuals; rather it is the tragic past which destroys their lives totally. Moreover the rejection of old habits, traditions and conditioning, and a merging with the culture of the new context is an existing issue of the post modern transcultural world. The new world not only offers professional opportunity and financial betterment, but also provides a chance to obliviate the haunted memories of the tragic past. And immigration or displacement is a kind of rebirth in a new culture. The feeling of home is like something haunting and dark which frightens the people. Their quest of survival in a transcultural world, and their will to sacrifice their relations for that reason is an insight into situations of fast changing social fabric in India. This research explores how the male and the female agency works in order to build an individual identity, and it constructs individual realities based on personal experiences of the old world and the changing perceptions of the new world.
Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary-gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.
This volume addresses the impact of human movement on the aesthetic practices that make up the fabric of culture. The essays explore the ways in which cultural activities—ranging from the habitual gestures of the body to the production of specific artworks—register the impact of migration, from the forced transportation of slaves to the New World and of Jews to the death camps to the economic migration of peoples between the West and its erstwhile colonies; from the internal and external exile of Palestinians to the free movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals. Rather than focusing exclusively on art produced by those identified as migrant subjects, this collection opens up the question of how aesthetics itself migrates, transforming not only its own practices and traditions, but also the very nature of our being in the world, as subjects producing, as well as produced by, the cultures in which we live. The transformative potential of cultures on the move is both affirmed and critiqued throughout the collection, as part of an exploration of the ways in which globalisation implicates us ever more tightly in the unequal relations of production that characterise late modernity. This collection brings academic scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation with practising visual and verbal artists; indeed, many of the essays break down the distinction between artist and academic, suggesting a dynamic interchange between critical reflection and creativity.
In his artistic research, Giovanni Perillo aims to generate conflicts with oneself, to weaken certainties, stereotypes and rigid expectations, encouraging a dialogue to express one's reflections on the real freedom of one's choices and on the possible influences that they imply. Through a détourner, a displacement, a deviation from alienating cultural mechanisms, aesthetic experimentation can become practical for a transformation towards a different self-awareness. "Taking the cue from the theory of events, I started to research stimuli and creative interaction processes through my artistic investigation and production. The stimuli had to be able to arouse behaviours and interpretations that are far from conformist and pre-established models. The interpretations, as answers to a stimulus coming from reality, are the significant consequences of the sense and vision of reality. The conventional and conformist interpretations form the specific psychological structure of a culture, and for this reason, they are its identity. If the reactions of the individuals who interact with artwork were not spontaneous, heterogeneous or unpredictable, they would show the homogenized and homogenizing game of taking part to practices where roles and goals of the players are pre-establish and reinforce a system of perception of reality that is influenced by dominant socio-cultural models." - Excerpt from the Introduction by Giovanni Perillo "In Art of Displacement, Giovanni Perillo establishes a new and important dialogue around ethnicity, displacement and migration. Spanning the arts as well as the social sciences—and in particularly psychology—Perillo asks us to take a leap of faith. He wants us to leave the comfort of our academic homes and to escape our “ivory towers” and consider what displacement means. Establishing his discussion in a project he calls “the Aesthetics of Migrations,” Perillo pushes boundaries, challenges assumptions. Perillo uses the Art of Displacement to help us navigate the beliefs and preconceived assumptions we bring to our encounters with migrants and strangers. More importantly, he asks us to recognize the constructed nature of our assumptions we make about migrants and strangers. Once we recognize our own bias, he offers the opportunity to search for alternatives. The French philosopher/sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that human life is organized around habitus or the ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess, that are grounded in life experience; and that organize our response to the world around us. Habitus is powerful and creates an assumption of the natural order that becomes real as it is shared and used to organize beliefs, laws and social rules. Perillo helps us recognize how a Western habitus limits and restricts our ability to connect; in fact, he goes so far as to argue our shared habitus, embodied in the maps we create, fragment our world and the people in it in ways that drive stereotypes, prejudice and the rise of nationalistic xenophobia we see today." - Jeffrey H. Cohen, PhD, Professor of Anthropology at Ohio State University, United States Content PREFACE by Jeffrey H. Cohen INTRODUCTION MEMORIZATION OF FACES, ASSOCIATED WITH PROFESSIONS AND CHARACTERS IMAGE OF THE WORD, WORD TO THE IMAGE THE INFLUENCE OF STEREOTYPES AND PREJUDICES IN AESTHETIC CHOICES AESTHETICS OF MIGRATIONS SKIN colourS TEST II ARTWORKS SERIES OF MAPS WITH MIGRATORY EXCHANGES IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE RULE OF CONTIGUITY AND WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF RETURN TO PREVIOUSLY INHABITED REGIONS SKIN colourS TEST NEARLY EQUAL PALO DEL COLLE SKIN colourS PROJECT SKIN colourS TEST II
This Handbook provides the knowledge and tools needed to understand how displacement is lived, governed, and mediated as an unfolding and grounded process bound up in spatial inequities of power and injustice. The handbook ensures, first, that internal displacements and their everyday (re)occurrences are not overlooked; second, it questions ‘who counts’ by including ‘displaced’ people who are less obviously identifiable and a clearly circumscribed or categorised group; third, it stresses that while displacement suggests mobility, there are also periods and spaces of enforced stillness that are not adequately reflected in the displacement literature; and fourth, it re-evokes and explores the ‘place’ in displacement by critically interrogating peoples’ ‘right to place’ and the significance of placemaking, unmaking, and remaking in the contemporary world. The 50-plus chapters are organised across seven themes designed to further develope interdisciplinary study of the technologies, journeys, traces, governance, more-than-human, representation, and resisting of displacement. Each of these thematic sections begin with an intervention which spotlights actions to creatively and strategically intervene in displacement. The interventions explore myriad meanings and manifestations of displacement and its contestation from the perspective of displaced people, artists, writers, activists, scholar-activists, and scholars involved in practice-oriented research. The Handbook will be an essential companion for academics, students, and practitioners committed to forging solidarity, care, and home in an era of displacement.
This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades.
Rule by Aesthetics offers a powerful examination of the process and experience of mass demolition in the world's second largest city of Delhi, India. Using Delhi's millennial effort to become a 'world-class city,' the book shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. This practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms - what Ghertner calls 'rule by aesthetics' - allowed the state in Delhi to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, overcoming its historical reliance on inaccurate maps and statistics. Slums hence were declared illegal because they looked illegal, an arrangement that led to the displacement of a million slum residents in the first decade of the 21st century. Drawing on close ethnographic engagement with the slum residents targeted for removal, as well as the planners, judges, and politicians who targeted them, the book demonstrates how easily plans, laws, and democratic procedures can be subverted once the subjects of democracy are seen as visually out of place. Slum dwellers' creative appropriation of dominant aesthetic norms shows, however, that aesthetic rule does not mark the end of democratic claims making. Rather, it signals a new relationship between the mechanism of government and the practice of politics, one in which struggles for a more inclusive city rely more than ever on urban aesthetics, in Delhi as in aspiring world-class cities the world over.
Jacques Rancière’s work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the “politics of aesthetics” and the “aesthetics of politics”? Specifically, the book explores the implications of Rancière’s rethinking of the relationship of aesthetic to political democracy from a wide range of critical perspectives. Distributions of the Sensible contains original essays by leading scholars on topics such as Rancière’s relation to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film. The book concludes with a new essay by Rancière himself that reconsiders the practice of theory between aesthetics and politics.
