Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India's Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political participations and dissociations. Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sunderason activates, instead, distinctly locational histories that refract transnational currents. She analyzes largely unknown and dispersed archives—drawings, diaries, posters, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside paintings and prints—and insists that art as archive is foundational to understanding modern art's socialist affiliations during India's long decolonization. By bringing together expanding fields of South Asian art, global modernisms, and Third World cultures, Partisan Aesthetics generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization.

Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with conjunctural and climactic histories of late-colonial and postcolonial India, to foreground political, social, and intellectual formations of modern art during India's long decolonization.

Explores interconnections among early 20th-century visual, literary, and performance art

Case studies that counter the idea of a transcendent art canon by demonstrating that the content of any and every canon is historically and culturally specific.

Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of "critical practice." We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered "outsider" art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art’s "post-critical turn." This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art’s inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those "uncritical" forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.

The Art of Populism in US Politics investigates connections between populist politics and artistic expressions in the United States in the Trump era. Beginning with comparisons between frontier populism and millennial-era populism, the author examines how citizens imitate and improvise on political sentiments, global histories, images, and discourses to create their own senses of community, identity, belonging, and exclusion. Political art, narratives, opinions, polemics, and abstract artistic expressions are shared instantly, creating new political and affective communities that challenge the power and stability of previous institutions and ideologies. These modes of digital sharing create communities of practice, groups who come together through shared creation and consumption, whether it be memes and vlogs, homemade signs and T-shirts, music videos, or political dialogues. The book analyzes the physical and digital art practices that support the growth and proliferation of populist politics and the fractious communities in America that support it. With modular chapters providing in-depth case studies within the larger context of populism, this book provides alternate methodologies for working through key issues of politics, production, distribution, globalization, and political economy, particularly because of the ways in which different forms of media—art, video, text, music—are brought into productive dialogue with each other. This book is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students of political science, cultural studies, music studies, American studies, and art and media studies.

Collection of essays that focuses on the influence of aesthetic theories and concepts on political theorizing.