Overview

Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life.   Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that expresss a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‑class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.

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Reviews

Dr. Jisha Menon's Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India reminds us that above all neoliberalism is an aesthetic project. While sparing no details about new forms of economic and social precarity, Menon's luxurious considerations and astute analyses of contemporary artworks and creative modes of living in post-liberalized Indian urban centers remind us of how creative reimagining can transform even the most difficult economic and social realities into sites of possibility for dwelling differently. Menon's concentration on the artworks, and particularly their materiality, is a welcome reprieve from overly determined readings of art under advanced capitalism, whose authors often ignore the complexity of neoliberalism and art made under its conditions. --Patricia Ybarra, author of Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism (Northwestern University Press, 2018)

Author Information

JISHA MENON is an associate professor of theater and performance studies at Stanford University, where she holds a courtesy appointment in comparative literature. She is the author of The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition.

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