Deadly serious: Humor and the politics of aesthetic transgression

This essay examines the political utility of humor using a framework developed in recent geopolitical scholarship read through Jacques Rancière's theorization of the politics of aesthetics and applied to everyday political life in contemporary Mexico City. Geopolitics here offers a unique lens through which to understand the spatiality of humor and its effects on the aesthetic and affective processes by which urban identities are constructed and contested. Building on roughly 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that humor's subversive potential allows for simultaneous or co-constitutive aesthetic effects, such as the simultaneous disruption of political norms and the genesis of a more inclusive spatial imaginary of urban citizenship. This argument extends previous work on humor by emphasizing the complex, mutable, and multifarious nature of humor effects in practice, perhaps most especially in subversive modes. I demonstrate the strategic political value of humor through the exploration of three ethnographically derived examples: an episode of a popular satirical video series, a newly christened popular saint said to protect residents of an historic neighborhood from gentrification, and a humorous tirade against the city's mayor at a local neighborhood meeting.

“It’s not 30 pesos. It´s 500 years”: monuments, memory and activism in the Wallmapu during the estallido social in Chile

This article studies to what extent the interaction between activists and historical monuments during the 2019 Chilean protests created a shift in the interpretation of the country’s past, thus facilitating the emergence of alternative and more inclusive narratives able to challenge hegemonic power structures. The article embarks on this endeavour through an analysis of three cases of demonumentalisation that occurred in the Chilean city of Temuco on the 29th of October 2019. Methodologically, the article engages with a combination of theories regarding the coloniality of power, the politics of aesthetics, and cultural memory. Finally, the paper concludes by arguing that Chilean activists’ engagement in the practice of demonumentalisation exposed alternative narratives concerning the historical conflict between the Chilean state and the Mapuche community. Making visible the perpetuation of unjust social structures in Chilean society and creating bonds of solidarity between the Chilean mass movement and the Mapuche movement.

Tracing the politics of aesthetics: From imposing, via counter to affirmative memorials to violence

Memorials have become increasingly relevant in societies seeking to come to terms with the past of mass violence and there is a growing body of academic scholarship that scrutinises the politics of memory in divided societies. This article takes a different approach to the politics of memorials: it does not focus on what is remembered, that is, to what a memorial testifies, but how memory at a memorial (supposedly) takes place through the aesthetic strategies put to work. It contributes to emerging literature which explores aspects of performativity and the politics of affect. The objective is, however, to take it one step further by not only shifting attention to studying the engagement with, experience and performance at these sites but also to the politics of the aesthetics choice that promote this engagement. To do so, it differentiates between three aesthetic styles of memorials: imposing, counter and affirmative memorials that were all developed at a particular time in order to pursue particular political and social objectives. The current phenomenon, affirmative memorials, holds that there is a duty to remember and is firmly embedded in efforts to build peace, advance liberal norms and contribute to transitional justice. Pursuing this strategy is however at odds with the aesthetic style of these affirmative memorials that is derived from counter memorials and celebrates plurality and openness rather than wanting to affirm one message.

Aesthetic practices in the climate crisis: Intervening in consensual frameworks of the sensible through images

Previous research has shown that Western visual journalism has represented climate change through certain repetitive and stereotypical imagery mainly consisting of catastrophic images of climate change impacts, images depicting technological causes and solutions, and images of politicians and activists. This imagery has proven to be distant, abstract, and ineffective in motivating personal engagement with climate change. In this article, we claim that visual journalism's representations of climate change are rooted in the consensual frameworks of human-centredness and consumption-centredness. Leaning on Jacques Ranciére's notion of “the politics of aesthetics”, we aim to challenge these frameworks. We suggest, with examples from visual arts, four aesthetic practices which could intervene in these frameworks: 1) revealing connectedness, 2) recognising agency, 3) compromising the attractions of consumerism, and 4) illuminating alternatives. We propose that visual representations, renewed through these aesthetic practices, could have an effect on how people connect to climate issues and imagine possibilities for agency in the climate crisis. Implementing these aesthetic practices would entail shifts in the sphere of visual journalism.

Speculative Spaces in Grand Paris : Reading JR in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil

This chapter engages with the spatial politics of aesthetics in the Parisian suburbs of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil. It examines how JR’s street art brings into view the lines of tension informing neighbourhood change. Firstly, the chapter explores how urban aesthetics have become important to gentrification analysis and looks at the commodification of socially engaged aesthetic practices via the “creative cities” ethos. In the subsequent sections, the chapter introduces a relational reading of JR’s artistic practice in “Clichy- Montfermeil.” The central questions guiding the enquiries are as follows: What can street art tell us about the antagonisms shaping processes of speculation in these towns? What can its aesthetic presence reveal about shifts in spatial imaginaries that are disarticulating the banlieues as “deviant,” “no-go zone” to rearticulate them “as a hunting ground for seasoned investors” (Clerima 2019)?

Distancias. Hacia un régimen estético-político de la imagen-movimiento = Distances. Towards an Aesthetic and Political Image-Movement Regime

Se interpelan las tensiones en las distancias entre sentidos estéticos y discursos políticos a partir de analizar las revoluciones técnicas y estéticas que se produjeron en la cinematografía de la década de 1920. Para ello se analizan tres largometrajes: Metrópolis, de Fritz Lang (1927), Berlín. Sinfonía de una ciudad, de Walter Ruttmann (1927) y El hombre de la cámara, de Dziga Vértov (1929). En ellos la ciudad se presenta como escenario donde los cuerpos se mueven, narrado por un conjunto de imágenes cuyo montaje se proyecta como el compás armónico de un régimen estético-político de la imagen-movimiento. En el hiato entre educar con la mirada y educar la mirada se trasluce la distancia entre lo que Jacques Rancière denomina como la «estética de la política» y la «política de la estética». Lo cual, confrontándolo con Walter Benjamin, posibilita observar las distancias entre imágenes, entre técnicas, entre originalidades y reproducciones, entre la estética y la política.AbstractThe aim is to analyze the distances between aesthetic senses and political speeches by technical and aesthetical cinematography revolutions happened in the 1920s. This is observed at three feature films: Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), Berlin. Symphony of a Metropolis (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) and The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vértov, 1929). At those films the city is exhibited as a scenario where bodies are moving, narrated by a set of images whose assembly is projected as the harmonic compass of an aesthetic-political regime of the image-movement. In the hiatus between educating with the gaze and educating the gaze itself, the distance between what Jacques Rancière called as the «aesthetics of politics» and the «politics of aesthetics» is studied. Confronting this with Walter Benjamin’s theory, it is possible to observe the distances between images, between techniques, between originality and reproduction and between aesthetics and politics.

Cuban Realism, or the Novel as a Democratic Fiction: Abilio Estévez’s Los palacios distantes

In the last decades, attention to post-Soviet Cuban fiction has often intimated that this body of literature is the aesthetic counterpart to socialism’s exhaustion and that its narrative is likely to follow a telos of disenchantment. This article argues that counter to such a paradigm and in the wake of the Special Period, Cuban fiction registers the formation of new subjectivities as it opens a space for a new politics through a non-mimetic form of realism that points to writing’s democratic capacity. Taking as an example Abilio Estévez’s 2002 novel Los palacios distantes, this article points to the novel’s suspension of dystopian causality and argues that textual interruptions in the novel afford the repartitioning of the limits of the sayable, visible and possible with respect to socialist ideology. This article draws attention to the politics of aesthetics in post-Soviet Cuban fiction, while also attributing this politics of form to the broader relation of aesthetics to politics.