SUNY series in Critical Political Science – serie

Leading scholars grounded in a range of disciplines examine the intersection of anti-racist activism, aesthetics, and contemporary political theory.The Art of Anti-Racism offers a sustained theoretical examination of the aesthetic dimensions of anti-racist struggle. It argues that political theory itself can be understood as an art—a dynamic process of claim-making and critically analyzing and expanding our ethical, moral and strategic visions. Politics, likewise, is the art of assembling messages, narratives, symbols, emotions, and affects in public and through collective institutions and structures. Art, in turn, can serve as a critique of existing political realities while gesturing toward a horizon beyond, reimagining the boundaries of the politically possible. Through its expressive capacity, art dramatizes subjectivity, experience, and aspirations, embodying the contestation that is central to democratic politics. Given these intersections, contemporary political theory offers invaluable resources for engaging with the aesthetics of anti-racist political thought, practice, and culture. The contributors to this volume explore the following questions: How might various accounts of power and resistance be brought to bear on evaluating the often-unquantifiable political effects of creative anti-racist interventions? What insights can political theory provide to strengthen ties between anti-racist art and broader movement aims? How might art itself be reimagined and reconstructed to align with anti-racist praxis?

Leading scholars grounded in a range of disciplines examine the intersection of anti-racist activism, aesthetics, and contemporary political theory.The Art of Anti-Racism offers a sustained theoretical examination of the aesthetic dimensions of anti-racist struggle. It argues that political theory itself can be understood as an art—a dynamic process of claim-making and critically analyzing and expanding our ethical, moral and strategic visions. Politics, likewise, is the art of assembling messages, narratives, symbols, emotions, and affects in public and through collective institutions and structures. Art, in turn, can serve as a critique of existing political realities while gesturing toward a horizon beyond, reimagining the boundaries of the politically possible. Through its expressive capacity, art dramatizes subjectivity, experience, and aspirations, embodying the contestation that is central to democratic politics. Given these intersections, contemporary political theory offers invaluable resources for engaging with the aesthetics of anti-racist political thought, practice, and culture. The contributors to this volume explore the following questions: How might various accounts of power and resistance be brought to bear on evaluating the often-unquantifiable political effects of creative anti-racist interventions? What insights can political theory provide to strengthen ties between anti-racist art and broader movement aims? How might art itself be reimagined and reconstructed to align with anti-racist praxis?

Brings together activists and scholars from across the world to coimagine and cultivate ecologies of solidarity and care beyond capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and the state.Recent years have witnessed an organized global backlash of authoritarian politics with a resurgence of xenophobic nationalisms, colonialism, racism, anti-feminist movements, climate denialism, and the purposeful undermining of existing democratic systems. In response, Deep Commons invites us to instead cultivate radically different political communities of solidarity and care. Linking ecological, anti-capitalist, feminist, Indigenous, and animal liberation politics intersectionally, activists and scholars from the growing Deep Commons community, representing a diversity of positions between the core and periphery of empire, share concrete examples and grassroots lived experiences of these liberatory psycho-socio-material relations. The book therefore focuses through one key question: How do we do it? How do we cultivate ecologies of solidarity and care beyond capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and the state?