The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man”

By Kandice Chuh

Book Overview

In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls "illiberal humanism," instead of the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing that the liberal humanities contribute to the reproduction of the subjugation that accompanies the definition of the human according to liberalism, Chuh argues that instead of defending the humanities as widely called for in recent years, they need to be radically remade. Chuh proposes that the work of artists and writers like Lan Samantha Chang, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allan deSouza, Monique Truong, and others, bring to bear ways of being and knowing that delegitimize liberal humanism in favor of more robust, capacious, and worldly senses of the human and the humanities. Chuh presents the aesthetics of illiberal humanism as vital to the creation of sensibilities and worlds capable of making life and lives flourish.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1478000929
• ISBN13: 9781478000921
• Release Date: April 2019
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 9.0"