Diversity of Aesthetics, Vol III: Looting

Looting is direct action par excellence. But it is also a nearly irrecuperable aesthetic gesture against the police, whiteness, and the regime of property that gives those forces power and purpose. In revealing the innately ideological and social content of property ownership, in demonstrating that all that stands between us and plenty is a thin sheet of plate glass, looting destabilizes the ideological hold of whiteness, property, and capital, and it has done so since the enslaved looted themselves singly and en masse from the plantation. 

—Vicky Osterweil

Diversity of Aesthetics is a multi-volume editorial project started with the goal of facilitating conversations between radical thinkers and cultural workers about artistic production, aesthetics, struggles against racialized capitalism, and revolutionary theory through our shared experiences.

The first volume, titled Inside and Outside: Infrastructures of Critique features Michael Rakowitz, Shellyne Rodriguez, and Stevphen Shukaitis in conversation with Andreas Petrossiants mapping connections between social movements and artistic work.

The second volume, Foreigners Everywhere, presents a lesser-known account of Claire Fontaine’s reception outside of the university and the museum in the Global South and features a conversation between Claire Fontaine, Iman Ganji, and Jose Rosales ranging from the 2021 strikes in Iran to the internationalist potential of the practice of translation.

Lastly, volume 3 is titled Looting and is a conversation between Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, and Vicky Osterweil. They discuss looting as a modality of Black struggle and a form of contesting whiteness, property, politics, and modes of governance. Looting is discussed via aesthetic theory, but also in the ways it has been and is used by states to protect constituent modes of power and to cultivate Western culture. It is an engagement with centuries of Black radical thought, history, and social movements. 

PRODUCT DETAILS

Authors: Saidiya Hartman, Vicky Osterweil, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott
Edited by: Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales
Publisher: Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales in collaboration with the Emily Harvey Foundation
Published: September 2023
Format: Paperback
Size: 4.625 inches (width) x 7.75 inches
Page count: 64 Pages

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Saidiya Hartman was born and raised in New York City. She is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W. W. Norton, 2019).

Vicky Osterweil is a writer, worker, and agitator based out of Philadelphia. She is the author of In Defense of Looting (2020) and The Extended Universe (forthcoming, 2024).

Christina Sharpe is a writer, professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016) and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010). Her third book, Ordinary Notes, is forthcoming (Knopf/FSG/Daunt).

Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and Chair in the Department of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo; there he is also the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. Walcott is the author of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Duke, 2021) and On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Biblioasis, 2021) which was short-listed for the Toronto Book Award in 2021. Currently Walcott is working on two monographs, one on freedom and the sea, and another on Black queer expressive culture. A third work will seek to grapple with the possibilities of achieving utopia from the grips of the catastrophe that threatens to consume all of planetary life. Rinaldo was born in Barbados. He divides his time between the city of Buffalo and the city of Toronto.