Sadism to Solidarity - ARTMargins

It has become commonplace to acknowledge the internal exclusions constitutive of European modernism and modernity, whether in the form of art naïf and primitivism or of colonial war and neo-imperial social violence. Frantz Fanon poses a question all too easily forgotten in the increasingly mainstream endeavor of globalizing art: what does it mean to speak of national culture and, by extension, of culture generally, in the context of a struggle to destroy and radically remake ethical, political, and social relations? Setting aside, at least for the moment, the complexity of Fanon's relationship to this context, these lines also pose a broader set of questions about the role of the aesthetic, alternately in constituting new political subjects and in figuring their transformation within determinate idioms and contexts. The texts included in the present issue not only signal the contradictions and omissions of modernism, they also attempt to figure an ethics and a politics emerging from the very concrete social and political conditions of those lacunae. In doing so, they underscore the tension between culture (as a relation to the repressed in language) and politics (as a relation between the individual and the collective) implied in Fanon's discussion of “national culture.”

Published by MIT Press
Softcover, 146 pages
23 x 15 cm.