Monique Roelofs on Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the World

Time and place: April 1, 16h-18h, via zoom

We are happy to invite you to the next Critical Cultural Theory Seminar on Arts of Address. Prof. Monique Roelofs will discuss her new book Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the World that has been published in 2020 with Culumbia University Press.

Summary:

Modes of address are forms of signification that we direct at living beings, things, and places, and they at us and at each other. Seeing is a form of address. So are speaking, singing, and painting. Initiating or responding to such calls, we participate in encounters with the world. In readings of writers and artists ranging from Julio Cortázar to Jamaica Kincaid and from Martha Rosler to Pope.L, Roelofs demonstrates the centrality of address to freedom and a critical political aesthetics. Hume, Kant, and Foucault enter into conversation with Fanon and Anzaldúa. Drawing on a wide array of artistic and theoretical sources and challenging disciplinary boundaries, the book illuminates address’s significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic engagement in it.

Monique Roelofs is Professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture and Chair of Critical Cultural Theory at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the relation between aesthetics and politics, with special attention paid to the dynamics of race, gender, coloniality, and the global. She is the author of Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and The World (Columbia UP, 2020) and The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (Bloomsbury, 2014). Roelofs has a new book in the works titled “Aesthetics, Address, and the Politics of Culture.” She is also coauthoring a book on aesthetics and temporality in Latin(x) America and coediting an anthology on Black Aesthetics.

Please contact m.vantunen@uva.nl to receive the zoom link and, if desired, the introduction and the first chapter of the book