Aesthetic Democracy argues that the possibility of social and political democracy depends primarily upon art and aesthetics, and that it is art which determines the possibilities of human freedom.

In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”

Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society.

Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential "A Theory of Justice," this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.

Hirschkop treats Bakhtin not as a metaphysician or a philosopher for the ages, but as a writer inevitably drawn into the historical conflicts produced by a modernizing and democratizing Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage reveals a vital but little-recognized current in American theatrical history: the dramatic representation of the quotidian and mundane. Jacob Gallagher-Ross shows how twentieth-century American theater became a space for negotiating the demands of innovative form and democratic availability. Offering both fresh reappraisals of canonical figures and movements and new examinations of theatrical innovators, Theaters of the Everyday reveals surprising affinities between artists often considered poles apart, such as John Cage and Lee Strasberg, and Thornton Wilder and the New York experimentalist Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Gallagher-Ross persuasively shows how these creators eschew conventional definitions of dramatic action and focus attention on smaller but no less profound dramas of perception, consciousness, and day-to-day life. Gallagher-Ross traces some of the intellectual roots of the theater of the everyday to American transcendentalism, with its pragmatic process philosophy as well as its sense of ordinary experience as the wellspring of aesthetic awareness.

"Latinx Catholics have used Our Lady of Guadalupe as a symbol in democratic campaigns ranging from the United Farm Workers movement to the Chicano movement to the movement for just immigration reform. In diverse ways, these groups use Guadalupe's symbol and narrative to make claims about justice in society's basic structures (law, policy, institutions, for example) while seeking to generate greater participation and representation in US democracy. Yet, Guadalupe is illegible within a liberal political framework that seeks to protect society's basic structures from religious encroachment by relegating religious speech, practices, and symbols to the realm of the background culture. In response to this problem, religious ethicists have argued for expansions of the liberal framework that would make religious language, arguments, and practices communities legible within a pluralistic society without capitulating to anti-democratic modes of governance that undermine pluralism. What remains unexplored is the way that the aesthetic dimensions of particular religious traditions can be engaged toward cultivating a more participatory democracy that invites substantive contributions to society's common life from religious people and communities. Instead, in conversation with political liberalism, Latinx theological aesthetics, and Catholic social thought, The Aesthetics of Solidarity examines the use of particular religious symbols to make democratic claims and generate greater participation and presence in the life of US democracy. After evaluating liberalism's capacity for constructive engagement with religion toward strengthening democratic participation, the project employs Latinx theological aesthetics and Catholic social thought to offer a constructive framework for interpreting religious symbols in the context of a religiously pluralistic and participatory democratic life"--

This challenging and timely study demonstrates that the problems Melville faced as a writer - the relationship between politics and aesthetics and the representation of the marginalized without appropriation - are similar to issues faced in the academy today.

This book considers John Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education and his theory of public sphere from the perspective of the reconstruction and redefinition of the dominant liberalist movement. By bridging art education and public sphere, and drawing upon contemporary mainstream philosophies, Ueno urges for the reconceptualization of the education of mainstream liberalism and indicates innovative visions on the public sphere of education. Focusing on Dewey’s theory of aesthetic education as an origin of the construction of public sphere, chapters explore his art education practices and involvement in the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia, clarifying the process of school reform based on democratic practice. Dewey searched for an alternative approach to public sphere and education by reimagining the concept of educational right from a political and ethical perspective, generating a collaborative network of learning activities, and bringing imaginative meaning to human life and interaction. This book proposes educational visions for democracy and public sphere in light of Pragmatism aesthetic theory and practice. Democratic Education and the Public Sphere will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate studies in the fields of the philosophy of education, curriculum theory, art education, and educational policy and politics. The book will also be of interest to policy makers and politicians who are engaged in educational reform.