Ebook: Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics

Under Representation argues that the relation between the concepts of freedom and universality and modernity’s racial order is grounded in aesthetic philosophy. Late Enlightenment aesthetics provide the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood by forging a “racial regime of representation” whose genealogy runs from Kant to Adorno and Benjamin.

There has recently been a significant renewal of interest in aesthetics in both philosophy and in literary and cultural criticism, but this is the only book that addresses head-on the role that aesthetics has played in shaping modern conceptions of race and of representation.