Promise of Beauty

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.

“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 practices 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 19th 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")

• Preface  ixAcknowledgments  xiIntroduction. Small Art and Love and Beauty  11. The Beautiful, Finding Itself in Danger, Desires Its Copy  372. An Education in Beauty (and the Necessity of Lawlessness)  703. The Right to Be Beautiful without Guarantee  1034. Beauty’s Ruin at the End of the World  1395. Living Beautifully, or Resilience  171Epilogue. In Conclusion, Crime Is Beauty  199Notes  209Bibliography  251Index  287