Research and Key Publications
At the core of my research lie the connections between aesthetics and politics, in particular, in connection with modalities of gender, race, class, and other intersecting dimensions. I pay special attention to the complexities of aesthetic experience as they take shape in our day-to-day encounters and are sparked by people, things and places within and beyond the world of art. My book The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (Bloomsbury, 2014; pbk, 2015) locates the concept of the aesthetic in the three constitutive notions of promises, relationality, and address. This yields a novel approach to the aesthetics-politics relation, one that recognizes the links between aesthetics and social differences.
While philosophers have long connected aesthetics with race and the categories intersecting with race, twenty-first-century theorists expose such connections to revised critical methods. Several outlooks come together in Aesthetics and Race, a special issue of Contemporary Aesthetics (2009) that I guest edited.
My current work runs along three main lines:
1. Two books on the notion of address–Modes of address are the multimodal forms of signification we direct at people, things, and places, and they at us and each other. They are a mainstay of social organization. Connecting art with its publics and sustaining both aesthetic and political meanings, they pervade the fields of love, language, design, food, and play. Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and The World, which theorizes address’s central mechanisms, was published by Columbia UP in January 2020. The recently completed manuscript Aesthetics, Address and the Politics of Culture further develops this analysis in an account of critical collectivity.
2. With Norman S. Holland I’m coauthoring a book called The Superreader and the Supershopper: Aesthetics, Time, and the Marketplace in Latin(x) America. This book explores how Latin(x) American art and literature use strategies of temporal dislocation to upend modern colonial market orders.
3. With Michael Kelly I’m coediting an anthology on Black Aesthetics, a subject on which we also coorganized a symposium at Hampshire College in 2017. For readings, program, and videos, see blackaesthetics.hampshire.edu and transaestheticsfoundation.org.
Selected Articles
“Philosophy and the Politics of Beauty,” in The Routledge Handbook of Beauty Politics, ed. Maxine B. Craig (New York: Routledge, 2021). Forthcoming.
“Playing with the Rules of the Game: Imagination, Normativity, and Address in Aesthetics,” in Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton, ed. Sonia Sedivy (New York: Routledge, 2021). Forthcoming.
“Selling Literature / Selling the Race: Diamela Eltit’s Decolonial Feminist Critique of the Neoliberal Marketplace.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77, no. 4 (2019): 461-73.
“A New Aesthetics of Conviviality.” Flash Art 327, “Reclaiming and Celebrating Minorities.” Sept. 2019: 28-35.
“Estética, endereçamento e ‘sutilezas’ raciais” (Aesthetics, Address, and Racial “Subtleties”). In Estética em preto e branco (Aesthetics in Black and White), ed. Carla Milani Damião and Fabio Ferreira de Almeida (Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil: Ricochete & CEGRAF/UFG, 2018), 8-34.
To Whom/What & Where this Address May Run: A Digital Thing, for the collection “Address Not Found,” curated by Gordon Hall/Center for Experimental Lectures. In Library Stack. July 2018. www.librarystack.org.
“Race-ing Aesthetic Theory.” The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, ed. Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2018): 365-79.
“Colheres, portas, ruas e pessoas como remetentes e destinatários. Estética e seus diversos locais de normatividade” (Spoons, Doors, Streets, and People as Addressors and Addressees: Aesthetics and Its Many Sites of Normativity). Rapsódia: Almanaque de filosofia e arte 11 (2017): 44-77.
“Identity and Its Public Platforms: A String of Promises Entwined with Threats” / “Identität und ihre öffentlichen Plattformen: Versprechen und Drohungen.” Texte zur Kunst 107. In English and German (Sept. 2017): 68-85.
Review essay of Paul C. Taylor’s Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016). Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 73.3 (2017): 299-302.
“Between Justice and Cruelty: The Ambivalence of the Aesthetic.” Aesthetic Turns 2.2, ed. Roger Rothman, Modernism/modernity, M/m Print Plus platform. June 2, 2017.
“Navigating Frames of Address: María Lugones on Language, Bodies, Things, and Places.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 31.2 (2016): 370-87. Cluster on Latina Feminism. DOI 10.1111/hypa.12233
“The Aesthetic and Its Resonances: A Reply to Kathleen M. Higgins, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Mariana Ortega.” In Symposium on The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic by Monique Roelofs. Contemporary Aesthetics 14 (2016). contempaesthetics.org.
“Kantian Mouthliness: Enlightenment, Address, Aesthetics.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26.2 (2015): 29-60. DOI 10.1215/10407391-3145949
Monique Roelofs and Norman S. Holland, “Anachronism and Baroque Abandon: Carpentier’s, Cortázar’s, and Botero’s Decolonial Columns.” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 30, no. 3 (2015): 149-66.
“Anti-Aesthetic.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd edition, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford University Press, 2014).
“Cruising through Race.” Race, Philosophy, and Film, ed. Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo and Dan Flory (Routledge, 2013), 84-100. Rpt. in Six Viewpoints on Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 85-99.
“Taste, Distaste, and Food.” Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, ed. Paul B. Thompson and David M. Kaplan (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014): 1719-27. DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4
“Beauty’s Relational Labor.” Beauty Unlimited, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 72-95.
Review essay of Gail Day’s Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. June 2011. www.ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23909
“Theorizing the Aesthetic Homeland: Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism in Daily Life and the Art World.” Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, ed. Mariana Ortega and Linda Martín Alcoff (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 201-230.
Introduction to Aesthetics and Race: New Philosophical Perspectives, Special Volume 2 (2009) of Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Monique Roelofs. contempaesthetics.org.
“Sensation as Civilization: Reading/Riding the Taxicab.” Aesthetics and Race: New Philosophical Perspectives, Special Volume 2 (2009) of Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Monique Roelofs. contempaesthetics.org.
“Race and Aesthetics.” Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edition, ed. Stephen Davies, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Hopkins, and Robert Stecker (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 489-492.
Review essay of Alexander Nehamas’s Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 399-401.
“The Aesthetics of Ignorance.” Feminist Aesthetics and Philosophy of Arts: Critical Visions, Creative Engagements, ed. L. Ryan Musgrave (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018). Rpt. from Chapter 5 of The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic, with slight revisions. Forthcoming.
“The Veiled Presence of Race in the Philosophy of Art: Reclaiming Race for Aesthetics.” APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 6, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 1-5. apaonline.org. (A slightly modified and more fully documented version of “Culture, Capital, History, but not Race?”).
“Culture, Capital, History, but not Race?” Voices of the Profession column. Newsletter of the American Society for Aesthetics 26, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 1-4. Also at aesthetics-online.org.
“Racialization as an Aesthetic Production: What Does the Aesthetic Do for Whiteness and Blackness and Vice Versa?” White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 83-124. Rpt. in The Philosophy of Race, ed. Paul Taylor, Vol. 3. Race-ing Beauty, Goodness, and Right (New York: Routledge, 2012), 291-327.
“A Pearl’s Perils and Pleasures: The Detail at the Foundation of Taste.” “The Lure of the Detail: Critical Reading Today.” Special Issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2003): 57-88.
“Aesthetification as a Feminist Strategy: On Art’s Relational Politics.” Art and Essence, ed. Stephen Davies and Ananta Ch. Sukla (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 193-212.
“Relationality without Relationships: Kitsch, Idolatry, and other Paradoxes in Aesthetics and Religion.” Religion “nach der Religionskritik” (Religion “after the Critique of Religion”). Wiener Reihe: Themen der Philosophy, Band 12, ed. Ludwig Nagl (Vienna and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg Verlag and Akademie Verlag, 2003), 263-73.
“A Hypothesis about Seeing-in.” Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression, ed. Rob van Gerwen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 59-74.
Grants and Awards
2018 Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship for Cosmopolitanism and the Decolonial City: Finding Carpentier’s Forgetful Pedestrians and Cortázar’s Fantastic Travelers.
2016 Major Project Initiatives Grant, American Society for Aesthetics, for Questioning Aesthetics Symposium: Black Aesthetics, Hampshire College, March 31-April 1, 2017. With Michael Kelly.
2015 American Society for Aesthetics Curriculum Diversification Award, for the project Theories of the Aesthetic: Rethinking Curricula in Philosophies of the Arts and Culture.
2013 Hirschberg Sustainability Curriculum Development Grant
Recent Courses
Aesthetics, Race, and Nation
The Body in Contemporary Philosophy
Feminist Philosophy and the Technologies of Race/Gender/Coloniality
Aesthetic Desire and Distaste: Art, Consumption, Markets, Politics
Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics, and the Concept of Address
Paradoxes of the Aesthetic: From Schiller to the Present
Black Aesthetics: Art, Race, Nation, and the Global
Latin American Literature: Between Modernity and Decoloniality (co-taught)
Feminist Philosophy: The Mysterious, the Playful, the Funny, the Useless, the Intimate, and the Indifferent
mroelofs [at] hampshire.edu
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https://www.hampshire.edu/faculty/monique-roelofs