Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Abstract

This book articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and on the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. It examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. The book's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. The study combines an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, and with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen. It also incorporates feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, the book challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to political ends and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.