aesthetics

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum

Imprint:

Published: 11/21/2024

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology examines the use of diagrams in anthropology to reimagine how we think about, and challenge, intellectual histories. Highlighting the impossibility of escaping what different disciplines and institutions deem to be “past,” the author combines critical analysis of selected diagrams with an expansive, exploratory reimmersion in their aesthetic, ethical, and political potential.[…]

Dutch Afro Becomings: Hybrid Being in Black Art and Culture

FORTHCOMING Spring 2026

In Dutch Afro Becomings, artist, curator, and researcher Charl Landvreugd argues that we do not yet have a language to understand Dutch Afro-ness, and that it is insufficient to rely on the discourses developed in African American, Black British, or Caribbean cultural theory alone. This critical monograph on continental European Black art and cultural history[…]

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State

Published: 10/27/2024

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy? Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork,[…]

The Way Things Go

Published: 09/12/2023

The Way Things Go contains a mix of poetry, art writing, and life writing about anticipatory grief, or mourning someone or something before it’s gone. Each successive chapter in the book decreases in length by exactly one sentence, from a 71-sentence-long opening chapter, to a 70-sentence-long second chapter, to 69 sentences, 68 sentences, and so[…]

Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights”

FORTHCOMING Spring 2025

Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights,” privileges works-based agency (praxis) in literary-artistic scholarship. The principal focus of the Franciscan-inspired embrace of a “no rights” status for works of literary-artistic scholarship is toward freeing both author and works from forms of technocratic determinism and neo-utilitarianism associated with regimes of intellectual property rights law and platform[…]

Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies: Treasures from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Daryl S. Paulson Collection

Published: 12/31/2022

The philosophical ties between Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies as represented in a selection of fine art—including Daoist nature deities and immortals, Confucian scholar brushes and inkstones, and Buddhist guardian kings and compassionate bodhisattvas—have never been explicated. This catalog lays the groundwork for a serious discussion of trans-Pacific acculturation: first by explaining the fundamentals[…]