Full Description
Strange Tastes is a philosophical excursion into aesthetic experience and the public through the works of contemporary Latin American and Latinx women writers and artists. In a careful study of this revelatory archive, Monique Roelofs shows how life lived aesthetically can embrace public space instead of surrendering it to the constrictive forces of gendering and racial capital. Joining notions of sensibility grounded in Enlightenment aesthetics with the creative capabilities of a decolonial aesthetics, Roelofs looks to practices that animate the public through intimate, social, and political registers, particularly by engaging the historical and critical potentialities of disinterested play and what she calls "strange tastes," or the unusual, uncanny, and nonnormative desires and sensations of marginalized individuals. Through sustained attention to materiality and lived experience, Roelofs offers a feminist philosophy of aesthetics that takes seriously the role of the public, where strange tastes turn aesthetic imaginaries into powerful possibilities to remake self, city, nation, and world.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Aesthetics, Taste, and Public Inhabitance 1
1. Dust: A Sniff of Getting Together 53
2. Pings: Sounding Out the City 85
3. Song: A New Life 133
4. Light: Sensibility on Sale 187
Conclusion. Singing Unsung Stories, Pivoting Positionalities 235
Notes 279
References 301
Index
