In thirteen essays from different aesthetic traditions, Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silences and Absences in False Familiarities problematizes our habituated customs of seeing and reading the familiar to focus on that which cannot easily be comprehended but may be sensed through encounters with the ruptures and gaps that quietly beckon our attention.

This binary also speaks more generally to how we tend to conceive of the relation between place and space: As many scholars have pointed out, place often comes valued as "the sphere of the everyday, or real and valued practices," or "a locus of denial" trailing ideas of the "closed, coherent, integrated as authentic, as 'home', a secure retreat" (Massey 2005, 5-6). Doreen Massey's descriptions speak to our perceptions of a center, of a core toward which energy flows, and in (...) so doing marking, in Michel de Certeau's words, "an instantaneous configuration of positions. (shrink)

This book is about the ways we make sense of the constant changes and interchanges of webs of meaning and being to which we are all connected. Working from textual, visual, historical, and contemporary fieldworks, each chapter presents a unique exercise on challenges of thinking through the figurations of imaginaries into their aesthetic forms.