Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics

by David Lloyd

Under Representation shows how the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy ground the racial order of the modern world in our concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity. In taking on the relation of aesthetics to race, Lloyd challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies, as well as the lack of sustained attention to aesthetics in critical race theory.

Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful “racial regime of representation” whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is not just about depiction of diverse humans or inclusion in political or cultural institutions. It is an activity that undergirds the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social.

Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental The racialized remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. Across five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the stereotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura and representation.

Both a genealogy and an account of our present, Under Representation ultimately helps show how a political reading of aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical than multicultural demands for representation.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2018

Reviews

[Brig · Rating 4 out of 5]

SO IMPORTANT TO READ IF YOU CARE ABOUT AESTHETICS AT ALL OR IF YOU DON'T THIS WILL TELL YOU WHY YOU SHOULD!

[yuefei]

An attempt to show that aesthetic philosophy since Kant’s third Critique is inseparable from his racist anthropology (as many philosophers claim), but that it is thoroughly structured by race (in particular the opposition between the “primitive” and the “civilised subject”). This is a spectre that haunts the humanities, which for Lloyd was a discipline aimed at the pedagogical production of subjects for the bourgeois liberal state (it’s fascinating how much aesthetics and political philosophy intermingles). Honestly this cleared up a lot of things for me, but Lloyd is a horrible writer—repetitive and overly academic (when he really doesn’t need to be imo).

Skipped through the chapter on Fanon (was in a rush to finish the essay), but will come back to it :)