Overview

Strange Tastes is a philosophical excursion into aesthetic experience and the public through the works of contemporary Latin American and Latinx women writers and artists. In a careful study of this revelatory archive, Monique Roelofs shows how life lived aesthetically can embrace public space instead of surrendering it to the constrictive forces of gendering and racial capital. Joining notions of sensibility grounded in Enlightenment aesthetics with the creative capabilities of a decolonial aesthetics, Roelofs looks to practices that animate the public through intimate, social, and political registers, particularly by engaging the historical and critical potentialities of disinterested play and what she calls “strange tastes,” or the unusual, uncanny, and nonnormative desires and sensations of marginalized individuals. Through sustained attention to materiality and lived experience, Roelofs offers a feminist philosophy of aesthetics that takes seriously the role of the public, where strange tastes turn aesthetic imaginaries into powerful possibilities to remake self, city, nation, and world.

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9781478033752

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Turning key Enlightenment aesthetic notions on their heads, Strange Tastes shows it is possible to find unruly imaginaries and ways of being inclusive of selves and tastes traditionally relegated to the edges of society. In Roelofs’ skillful writing, aesthetics breathes in a new life—one in which strange tastes teach us to perceive worlds anew.”—Mariana Ortega, author of, Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad “A work of undeniable originality, Strange Tastes gives readers a unique and productive theorization of diverse traditions of Latin American and Latinx feminist art and activism as deeply aesthetic. The book is grounded on an insightful and generative concept of taste that beckons for the consideration of cultural works in unexpectedly sensorial ways, while advocating for aesthetics as a dynamic, world-changing praxis.”—Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of, Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature

Author Information

Monique Roelofs is Professor and Chair of Philosophy of Art & Culture and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Arts of Address and The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic and co-editor of Black Art and Aesthetics.

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