Abstract

Monique Roelofs’s The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic is groundbreaking in its nuanced account of the potential and limitations of the aesthetic for creating a more just, humane world. Particularly timely are Roelofs’s analyses of the ways in which racial and gender stereotypes are reinforced and the operations of what she calls “racialized aesthetic nationalism,” the tendencies of aesthetic values to shore up schisms along racial, ethnic, and national lines. I raise questions, however, about the appropriateness of aesthetic criticism that stresses sins of omission, the desirability of insisting that the broad nexus of social relations always be kept in view, and the danger that foregrounding minority group membership and gender will reduce individuals in marked categories to mere exemplifications of such status.