Politics and aesthetics in the arts

"This volume brings together new essays to explore various ways in which aesthetics, politics, and the arts interact with one another. Politics is an elastic concept, covering an oceanic breadth of mechanisms for conducting relations among variously empowered groups, and these essays offer a range of perspectives, including nations, classes, and gendered subjects, which examine the imbrication, of politics with arts. Together they demonstrate the need to counteract the reductionist view of the relationship between politics and the arts which prevails in various ways in both philosophy and critical theory, and suggest that the irreducibility of the aesthetic must prompt us to reconceive the political as it relates to human cultural activity."--Jacket.