The “Africanization” of an African Diaspora Household: Toyin Falola and the Idea of Diasporic Home-Making

This essay is an exercise in the interrogation of cultural globalization, and how the idea of transnationalism generates identity responses. The authors used the concept of home-making to examine how Toyin Falola deployed an aesthetic sensibility of African art as ideological dynamics for the personalization of his home situated in a suburb in Austin, Texas. The Africanization agenda that the Falola house operationalized points at the critical role that interior decoration can play in African diaspora homes. The project is crucial because it undermines the homogenizing reach of globalization that dislocates the sense of identity of an average African transnational migrant. In the Falola home, we confront an assemblage of aesthetic consciousness, dynamics of Africanity, and identity construction.

Beyond thought:

The following is a remixed excerpt from a book-length manuscript titled My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence. The book is constructed as a theoretical fiction composed by the “author” Mark Amerika in collaboration with a GPT-2 language model. The book was written as an improvisational call-and-response writing performance with an AI text generator and is arranged as a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum. Critically reflecting on whether or not creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility, the author playfully engages with his cyberpunk imagination to simultaneously embrace and problematize human-machine collaborations. Contrary to most contemporary AI research that attempts to build AI systems that perform more like humans, Amerika flips the script and, in My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, questions how his own “psychic automatism” is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined.

Trust and Sincerity in Art

Our life with art is suffused with trust. We don’t just trust one another’s aesthetic testimony; we trust one another’s aesthetic actions. Audiences trust artists to have made it worth their while; artists trust audiences to put in the effort. Without trust, audiences would have little reason to put in the effort to understand difficult and unfamiliar art. I offer a theory of aesthetic trust, which highlights the importance of trust in aesthetic sincerity. We trust in another’s aesthetic sincerity when we rely on them to fulfill their commitments to act for aesthetic reasons—rather than for, say, financial, social, or political reasons. We feel most thoroughly betrayed by an artist, not when they make bad art, but when they sell out. This teaches us something about the nature of trust in general. According to many standard theories, trust involves taking the trusted to be cooperative or good-natured. But trust in aesthetic sincerity is different. We trust artists to be true to their own aesthetic sensibility, which might involve selfishly ignoring their audience’s needs. Why do we care so much about an artist’s sincerity, rather than merely trusting them to make good art? We emphasize sincerity when wish to encourage originality, rather than demanding success along predictable lines. And we ask for sincerity when our goal is to discover a shared sensibility. In moral life, we often try to force convergence through coordinated effort. But in aesthetic life, we often hope for the lovely discovery that our sensibilities were similar all along. And for that we need to ask for sincerity, rather than overt coordination.

Aesthetics and Environment: What is the Role of Beauty in Supporting Ageing Well?

Access to beauty is intrinsic to psychological, social, and spiritual health. Aesthetic sensibility includes awareness initiated in both mind and emotion accessed through nurturing environments (Caspari, Eriksson, & Naden, 2011). While individual tastes vary and aesthetic preferences are culturally conditioned, an appreciation of natural and constructed beauty is fundamental to human meaning-making, creativity, and innovation (Hillman 1998). Beauty is thus an instrumental tool that may support ageing well. We investigated the question of what aesthetics/beauty meant to older adults in England, how they experienced it, and whether experiencing beauty sustained them. Three focus groups were conducted with community dwelling participants aged between 60 and 93 (median age 75) for a total N of 14. Five themes emerged related to experience: an unexpected recognition; an evolving openness to experience; a universal perception available in micro and macro environments; a force that can alleviate depression; and a relational quality of some interactions. The value of beauty was identified through all groups: participants found it difficult to imagine a world with no beauty in it. They wondered if age made discernment capacity greater. Appreciation of beauty in unexpected places like a cracked pot led participants to identify happiness and wellbeing as outcomes of perception. This study suggests that beauty is essential for wellbeing and human flourishing and can emerge in unlikely ways. Implications are that professionals should assist older people to consider the role of beauty in life and develop interventions to consciously keep beauty awakened in normal and aesthetically-deprived environments.

The Current Problems of Aesthetic Creation in Chinese Film Art

Current market-led Chinese film production has made huge achievements. Market indicators certainly have their validity. However, the power of the market has been exaggerated so that it controls everything. Because of the disregard of film as an aesthetic object, the content, form and aesthetic sensibility of films have been neglected, preventing creation at a higher level. The loss of multiple cultural identities due to market factors and artistic indifference is hardly sustainable in the long run. In recent years, Chinese films have gradually improved their artistic aesthetics. How to reasonably coordinate the market and the realization of the value of art and culture itself is an urgent problem to be solved. Firstly, Chinese films should have creative imagination; secondly, Chinese films should have the artistic expression of the national core value of heroism; thirdly, Chinese films should have meticulous depictions of people. Under the perspective of aesthetic appreciation, it is a top priority for Chinese films to be more in line with reality and traditional aesthetic culture, and be more characterized in their creation.

Cross-Revolutionary Reading: Visions of Vietnam in the Transnational Arab Avant-Garde

This article looks at cross-revolutionary writing among Arab writers who, after the 1967 War, looked to Vietnam as an anti-imperialist revolutionary co-cause of the Palestinians and a possible alternative future of national liberation, and to Vietnamese literature as a parallel “literature of resistance.” Taking the Vietnam-Palestine comparison as a focal point, this article illuminates a transnational Arab network of avant-garde literary production that corresponded with, translated, and published each other’s work in Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, and the United States. As such, rather than an example of direct South-South comparison, cross-revolutionary Arab writing via Vietnam triangulated its critiques through the United States and European leftist movements, producing a model of literary production and revolutionary vision that was distinct from and critical of those movements’ solidarity politics. Cross-revolutionary reading produced a distinct conception of literary commitment and a new aesthetic sensibility in Arabic literature, and provides a model of comparison that does not elide but circumscribes European and American literature within its visionary gaze.

Race and Imaginary Intimacy in Jack

Through its focus on an interracial relationship in St. Louis after the Second World War, Jack interrogates the imaginative privilege of a white character whose seeming transcendence of the ordinary occurs at the expense of the black woman he romances. Jack’s aesthetic sensibility immobilizes and isolates him in an imaginative landscape; his desire to have Della, a black woman, accompany him there, however, implicates him in the literal destruction of her everyday world. This chapter uses phenomenological race theory and everyday life studies to highlight the way that the historical, material, and political pressures of the period, including the threat of eminent domain that looms over the abstracted landscape of the novel, disrupt Jack’s literary and symbolic rendering of this love story. By inviting the reader to pursue Jack’s imaginative interests, the novel constructs an uncomfortable romance troubled by the encroachments of the wider world it would exclude.

“Pretty as a Picture”

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in travel writing, postcolonialism, and landscape politics. However, studies of travel writing addressing the notion of the picturesque have not yet explored the idea of aesthetic sensibility in British travel narratives in the Regency of Tunis. This article examines the aesthetics of the picturesque in three British travel accounts: Grenville Temple’s Excursions in the Mediterranean: Algiers and Tunis (1835); Robert Lambert Playfair’s Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis (1877); and Henry Spencer Ashbee and Alexander Graham’s Travels in Tunisia (1887). These travelers used the picturesque in different but interlinked ways; they oscillated between finding the uncanny landscape an object of delight where it conformed to British aesthetic doctrine and an object of derision where they noted aesthetic deficiencies. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this picturesque way of seeing shifted into an Orientalist desire for “Otherness.”