Description
The aesthetic turn in international studies has been primarily dominated by a normative focus on the visual– so much so that the terminology surrounding aesthetic politics and visual IR are often widely conflated. Although there’s an emerging literature around sound politics, visual inquiries, theories and methods are still vastly over-represented in comparison to other means of aesthetic engagement. I theorise that this epistemological asymmetry is born out of an understanding of aesthetics (rooted in Enlightenment thinking) which still runs through social science sub-disciplines today placing vision at the top of the sensory pyramid. In this paper, I propose, instead, a decolonial aesthetic framework building on the surrealist writings of Suzanne and Aime Cesaire. In doing so, I argue that the aesthetic turn has failed to take into account the emancipatory imperatives from the decolonial and anti-colonial literatures. In simultaneously being oriented towards the political and aesthetic, anticolonial surrealism gives us an interdisciplinary framework for thinking about the liberatory potentials at the productive intersection of politics and culture.
