Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South: Reading the Primary Sources and Contexts

By J. Daniel Elam

This 900 page collection brings together political, aesthetic, and philosophical writing from across the non-European and postcolonial world. It covers critical thought from South East Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, regions often overlooked when studying critical thought. By assembling these 75 texts side-by-side it marks the first time that many of these writings have been considered properly as 'philosophy'.

Organised chronologically, the volumes are divided into Empire, Modernity and Critique. Each volume features the major figures associated with movements and schools of thoughts that defined a decade. From anticolonialism and revolution at the start of the century to the Third World aesthetics of the 1970s and the liberalisation, globalisation, and protest of the 1990s, assembled under these themes is the work of Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, Mao Zedong, Jawaharlal Nehru, W.E.B. Du Bois, Fidel Castro, Kim Sang-ok, Elena Poniatowska and Stuart Hall.

Accompanied by introductions providing historical and political context, the texts here are a necessity for anyone studying the development of contemporary critical thought around the world in the 20th-century.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1350167762
• ISBN13: 9781350167766
• Release Date: March 2025
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic