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Freedom and beauty can be understood as universal desires, and at the same time, are often constrained by the limits of our temporal reality. What it means to be free or to live in beauty is often grounded in our earthly experience, and from any perceived lack in our experience, our desire simultaneously reaches for more—for that which transcends our material reality. Perhaps this is best articulated in Saidiyah Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as that “indiscernible otherwise,” the desires beyond-yet-within the constraints of material experience. This paper will analyze Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives to explore transcendence as a practice in the lives of black women. Towards this task, this paper engages Platonist thinkers given the resonances with Platonist thought with themes found within Hartman’s text. The juxtaposition in placing Hartman’s text in conversation with Platonist dialogue reveals how distinctive particularities and divergences can expand our traditional conceptions.
This paper proposes that it is aesthetics that constitutes the "chaos" of white Christian nationalist political movements for the scholars who study them. In their description and evaluation of resurgent white Christian nationalism in the U.S., scholars tend either to ignore its aesthetics or immediately turn to ethics to distinguish it from other movements. I offer Philip Gorski’s work as an example of the former, and Nichole Flores’, the latter. In contrast, I argue that we must engage aesthetics on its own terms in order to understand how nationalist aesthetics functions in political motivations. Utilizing Deleuze’s and Guattari’s description of fascistic desire in Anti-Oedipus, I conclude that what distinguishes white Christian nationalism aesthetically from other political movements is that it is boring. In my final section, I explore possible interventions for Christian theorists to engage political aesthetics in tandem with, yet distinguished from, ethics.
In this paper I establish a new theoretical framework that presents iḥsān as an overarching tenet of the Qurʾānic worldview. The triliteral Arabic root of iḥsān is ḥ.s.n., its meaning combines the values of beauty and goodness together, it occurs 194 in the Qurʾān. Through a comprehensive and holistic intra-Qurʾānic investigation, I trace the different occurrences of the root to analyze the conceptual meaning of iḥsān in the Qurʾān guided by the tools of literary analysis and Arabic morphology. The findings show how the fusion of ethics and aesthetics, represented in iḥsān, reflect a Qurʾānic epistemology that speaks of God and creation, and acts as a catalyst for universal harmony.
Toni Morrison’s Paradise depicts a community of refuge, called the Convent, for women of color who have borne the brunt of racism, sexism, poverty, and any number of various other ills in their lives. Together they find community and healing, joy and sustenance. The Convent has utopic aspects, then, but it is no utopia. It is very much this-worldly. Nevertheless, in its non-domination and relationality, we can count it as a heterotopia, a form of life that exhibits ideals in the midst of the messiness and imperfection of actual life. Utopias are thoroughly aestheticized, and they typically involve a form of beauty: political beauty. This is the case for the community at the Convent, although as a heterotopia, it is a flawed beauty. As such, it is an important imaginative resource while avoiding the typical pitfalls of utopias: escapism and totalitarian homogeneity.