The art of global power : artwork and popular cultures as world-making practices

"Artwork and popular cultures are crucial sites of contesting and transforming power relationships in world politics. The contributors to this edited collection draw on their experiences across arts, activist, and academic communities to analyze how the global politics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are expressed and may be transformed through popular cultures and artistic labour. Through their methodological treatment of artwork and popular cultures as material sites of generating aesthetic knowledge and embodying global power, the authors foreground an analysis of global hierarchies and transformative empowerment through critically engaged political imagination and cultural projects. By centralizing an intersectional analysis of the racialized, gendered, economic dimensions of the praxis of culture, The Art of Global Power demonstrates how artwork and popular culture projects, events, and institutions are vital sites of transgressing the material conditions that produce and sustain unjust global power hierarchies. This book intervenes in the International Relations Popular Culture literature by problematizing the idea of a single homogenizing global popular culture and engaging with multiple popular cultures articulated from diverse global locations and worldviews. To the International Relations Aesthetics literature this book contributes an intersectional analysis of aesthetics as an embodied process of knowledge production and action that takes place within global conditions of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners of International Relations, and gender, cultural and media studies"-- Provided by publisher Artwork and popular cultures are crucial sites of contesting and transforming power relationships in world politics. The contributors to this edited collection draw on their experiences across arts, activist, and academic communities to analyze how the global politics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are expressed and may be transformed through popular cultures and artistic labour. Through their methodological treatment of artwork and popular cultures as material sites of generating aesthetic knowledge and embodying global power, the authors foreground an analysis of global hierarchies and transformative empowerment through critically engaged political imagination and cultural projects. By centralizing an intersectional analysis of the racialized, gendered, economic dimensions of the praxis of culture, The Art of Global Power demonstrates how artwork and popular culture projects, events, and institutions are vital sites of transgressing the material conditions that produce and sustain unjust global power hierarchies. This book intervenes in the international relations popular culture literature by problematizing the idea of a single homogenizing global popular culture and engaging with multiple popular cultures articulated from diverse global locations and worldviews. To the international relations aesthetics literature this book contributes an intersectional analysis of aesthetics as an embodied process of knowledge production and action that takes place within global conditions of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners of international relations, and gender, cultural, and media studies. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Page 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Dedication Page 6 Contents 8 List of figures 10 List of contributors 11 Acknowledgements 13 Series editor foreword 14 Introduction: artwork and popular cultures as world-making practices 16 PART I Artwork un/doing disciplinary boundaries 36 1 The art of crossing-over 38 2 Reproducing ‘popular’ empire: production, consumption and bodily labour in ‘America the Gift Shop’ 59 3 Interracial picturesque: Lorraine O’Grady’s history of the Americas 76 PART II The colonial self/other and decolonial popular cultures 88 4 Pop goes the boycott 90 5 Hybrid/fusion music and the cosmopolitan imaginary 109 6 Fashionably worn: Qaddafi’s radical dress and his shades 129 PART III Creative methods as world politics 154 7 Intersectional curating: the world, the street, the hand 156 Index 176