Overview

In The Promise of Beauty, Mimi Thi Nguyen explores the relationship between the concept of beauty and narratives of crisis and catastrophe. Nguyen conceptualizes beauty, which, she observes, we turn to in emergencies and times of destruction, as a tool to identify and bridge the discrepancy between the world as it is and what it ought to be. Drawing widely from aesthetic and critical theories, Nguyen outlines how beauty—or its lack—points to the conditions that must exist for it to flourish. She notes that an absence of beauty becomes both a political observation and a call to action to transform the conditions of the situation so as to replicate, preserve, or repair beauty. The promise of beauty can then engender a critique of social arrangements and political structures that would set the foundations for its possibility and presence. In this way, Nguyen highlights the role of beauty in inspiring action toward a more just world.

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9781478030973

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Reviews

“Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Promise of Beauty analyzes so much more than the pleasures that beauty seems to promise. Rather, this exquisite and textured analysis of beauty’s conceptual past urges a turn to beauty as a method to interrogate the limits, conditions, and potential of the present, detaching beauty from its ideological debts to humanism and urging a reattachment not only to what Nguyen calls ‘the times between revolutions’ but also, in the everyday practice of knowing and making beauty, to the need to believe that revolution will come again.” -- Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of * Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century * “The Promise of Beauty is itself a thing of beauty, that is, something to be modeled, admired, and exemplified. By using beauty-as-method, Mimi Thi Nguyen both makes it possible to and enjoins us to acknowledge the world-making capacity of beauty—not because it will save us, but because our conceptions of the beautiful are tethered into what and who we value and what we’re willing to do to achieve such ends. In other words, Nguyen presses us to consider what we are for in the course of theorizing and studying the promise of beauty.” -- Kandice Chuh, author of * The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” *

“Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Promise of Beauty analyzes so much more than the pleasures that beauty seems to promise. Rather, this exquisite and textured analysis of beauty’s conceptual past urges a turn to beauty as a method to interrogate the limits, conditions, and potential of the present, detaching beauty from its ideological debts to humanism and urging a reattachment not only to what Nguyen calls ‘the times between revolutions’ but also, in the everyday practice of knowing and making beauty, to the need to believe that revolution will come again.” -- Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of * Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century *

Author Information

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages; and coeditor of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader, both also published by Duke University Press.

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