The Promise of Beauty

"The Promise of Beauty examines how the perceived presence and absence of beauty structures cultural and historical inquiry. Drawing on a background in feminist and Asian American studies, Mimi Thi Nguyen approaches beauty as a method that attends to questions of aesthetics and politics from within a multisensory world history. Beauty also acts a vehicle for engaging contemporary narratives of crisis. Comprehending beauty in this way, Nguyen analyzes affective and aesthetic responses to scarcity, precarity, and uncertainty through the crises of war and colonial and capital dispossession. Utilizing historical and philosophical thinkers from Plato and Adorno to Elaine Scarry and Saidiya Hartman, Nguyen describes how beauty operates as a reference for the human, collectivity, politics, ethics, and other forms of life. In doing so, she seeks to understand the promise of beauty and how it functions as a world-building engagement"--