Diversity of Aesthetics

Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production.

Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis.

Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and riots—militant thinkers, artists, educators, and others discuss aesthetic production, forms of social organization, modes of struggle against gendered and racialized capitalism, and revolutionary theory. Common to all three conversations is a commitment to rethinking the relationship between forms of critique and forms of struggle undertaken by collective social practices, offering lessons for tactics, strategies, and practices.

Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and associate editor of e-flux journal. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space.

Jose Rosales is an independent researcher and journalist based in Lisbon, Portugal. His work has appeared in e-flux notes, Lumpen: A Journal of Poor and Working Class Writers, and has contributed a chapter called “Communism As the Riddle Posed to History” in Double Binds of Neoliberalism (2022).

CONTRIBUTORS

Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004, currently living and working in Palermo, Sicily.

Iman Ganji is a writer and scholar in exile and holds a PhD in Performance and Theatre Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. From 2004 to 2012, he lived in Tehran, where he worked as a translator, writer, and activist, cotranslating books by Spinoza, Marx, Benjamin, and others.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; Norton, 2022); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a University Professor.

Vicky Osterweil is a writer, organizer, and brick-mason based in Philadelphia. Her first book, In Defense of Looting, was an account of historical struggles for liberation in the United States. She has written about the intersections of film, politics and culture for a variety of outlets, including The Paris Review, Art in America, Al Jazeera America, The Baffler, Dissent, Lux Magazine, and The New Inquiry, where she was also a culture editor for many years. Her series on the political economy and cultural role of videogames, “Well Played,” which ran in Real Life Magazine from 2019–2020, won her the Blogger of the Year award from prestigious video game criticism outlet Critical Distance.

Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and editor living in NY. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and e-flux journal, where he is the associate editor. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space.

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). Her third book, Ordinary Notes (2023) won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize, and was a finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2027). In April 2024, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In May 2024 she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities.

Stevphen Shukaitis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, Centre for Work and Organization, and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. Since 2009 he has coordinated and edited Minor Compositions. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009) and The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016), and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.

Michael Rakowtiz is an Iraqi-American artist working at the intersection of problem-solving and troublemaking. His work has appeared in arts and cultural venues worldwide. He was awarded the 2018–2020 Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square. From 2019-2020, a survey of Rakowitz’s work traveled from Whitechapel Gallery in London, to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Torino, to the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. Rakowitz is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Jane Lombard Gallery, New York; and Barbara Wien Galerie, Berlin; Pi Artworks, Istanbul; and Green Art Gallery, Dubai. He lives and works in Chicago.

Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.

Jose Rosales is a journalist and independent researcher working on the history of revolutionary theory and its relationship to the collective practices that have recently emerged within contemporary social movements. Their writing can be found in Double Binds of Neoliberalism: Theory and Culture After 1968, Unworking (August-Verlag), Angry Workers of the World, Blind Field: A Journal for Cultural Inquiry, La Deleuziana, Deleuze and Guattari Studies Journal, Revista Punkto, SUNZI BINGFA, and e-flux Notes among others.

Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo. He holds the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. He is a writer and critic. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy and education broadly defined. As an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, Walcott has published in a wide range of venues on everything from literature to film, to theater to music to policy. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and books, as well as popular venues like newspapers and magazines and media online sources. He often comments on black cultural life for radio and TV. Walcott has edited or co-edited multiple works including Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000). Walcott is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003). He is also the author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies (Insomniac Press, 2016) and co-author of Black Life: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (Arbeiter Ring, 2019). In 2021, Walcott published The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom (Duke University Press) and On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Biblioasis).