Hall, Joshua M.: An Aesthetics of Disturbance in the Congo: from Adjunct Aesthetes to Artisanal Miners

Contemporary Aesthetics. forthcomingIn this essay, I explore two interconnected figures of aesthetics and poverty. The first figure is aesthetics poverty, meaning the (a) literal (relative) poverty of the majority precariously-employed scholars in what has been called the “ghettoization of aesthetics” within academic philosophy, and (b) figurative poverty of the discipline in terms of its tendency to focus narrowly on pleasurable and individual phenomena to the neglect of disturbing and commun