A01=Jisha Menon
Affect theory
Aspiration
Author_Jisha Menon
avant-garde performance
Beauty
Bombay
call centers
Category=AB
Category=ATD
cinema
confessional performance
Construction
drama
electronic waste
Emotional labor
Environment
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eviction
Foucault
gated communities
Gender
gender and sexuality
global city
Global south
hijra
hybridity
kothi
land mafias
Mahesh Dattani
materiality
Media studies
Narcissism
Neoliberalism
NGOs
Nostalgia
Parsi
Performance
plays
precarity
property development
Queer and transgender communities
real estate
Sexuality
slums
trash
urban planning
Urbanism
Visual art
Waste
Product details
- ISBN 9780810144064
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 153 x 230mm
- Publication Date: 15 Oct 2021
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life.
Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that expresss a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‑class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.
Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that expresss a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‑class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.
