Mimi Thi Nguyen, "The Promise of Beauty" (Duke UP, 2024)
01:24:05 Share

More rewards, more savings. With American Express Business Gold, earn up to $395 back in annual statement credits on eligible purchases at select shipping, food delivery, and retail subscription merchants, including the $155 Walmart Plus monthly membership credit and $240 flexible business credit. Enjoy the benefits of membership with the Amex Business Gold Card. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash gold. Amex Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express.

Um, I think I just won my taxes. Yeah? I just switched to H&R Block in about one minute. All I had to do was drag and drop last year's return into H&R Block, and bam, my information is automatically there. So I don't have to go digging around for all my old papers to switch? Nope. Sounds like we just leveled up our tax game. Switching to H&R Block is easy. Just drag and drop your last return. It's better with Block. ♪

Hi, this is Javon, your Blinds.com design consultant. Oh, wow. A real person. Yep. I'm here to help with everything from selecting the perfect window treatments to... Well, I've got a complicated project. No problem. I can even help schedule a professional measure and install. We can also send you samples fast and free. Hmm, I just might have to do more. Whatever you need. So the first room we're looking at is for... Shop Blinds.com now and save up to 40% site-wide. Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Okay.

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Najwa Mayar and I'm your host today. I'm joined by Mimi Tinouin, who is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We will be discussing her new book, The Promise of Beauty, published in October 2024 with Duke University Press. The Promise of Beauty traces how beauty comes to matter, not just as an aesthetic ideal, but as a political force, a method,

and a promise within times of crisis. Across chapters that move from national iconography in modern Vietnam, the Western gender development projects in war on terror-era Afghanistan,

From beauty pageants in post-conflict Cambodia to the visual economies of ruin in post-industrial Detroit, among many other contexts, Nguyen asks what beauty enables, what it conceals, and whom it serves. Through an expansive archive, she explores how beauty shapes the ways we imagine life, justice, and futurity in

in a world structured by catastrophe. Hi, Mimi. Thank you so much for joining me. Hi, Najwa. Thank you for having me. So this conversation is really both an honor and a joy for me because I've been a longtime admirer of your work.

and a general fangirl, really. So for other fangirls in future or fangirls in the audience, will you please introduce yourself by maybe talking about your journey to and within academia? Yeah, I mean, I basically,

made a series of impulsive decisions because I didn't want to get a job. And that's how I became an academic. I originally went to, you know, I went to Berkeley as an undergraduate. I had no particular intention of doing anything at all. I just wanted to be where I

The punks were because I grew up in suburban San Diego and I saw San Francisco and the Bay Area as this kind of punk mecca that I had read about in in zines where like, you know, there were all these punk institutions that I wanted to be a part of. So it was very accentuated.

accidental, like it was not an academic decision to go to Berkeley. It was more of a like, I want to be where the punks are. And so that's basically how I made a lot of my decisions. When I decided to go to graduate school, it was because I had a women's studies undergraduate degree. And I was like, well, I don't know what I'm going to do with this besides work at a nonprofit. And I don't want to do that.

I had been an activist. I was a clinic defense organizer as an undergraduate. So every weekend we would go out and do patient escorting into clinics that were being targeted by anti-abortion folks. And I was really burned out from doing that work every week. And so I decided to go to graduate school to try to figure out

how to do reproductive justice work in this context where there was a lot of violence at the time that was targeting doctors and clinics. So I wanted to figure that out. And I happened to go to a

20 year anniversary of the refugee camps at Camp Pendleton, uh, in San Diego, which it's a Marine base in San Diego County. And I, I went there the summer before I started graduate school. Uh,

It was a commemoration by like local Vietnamese organizations in Southern California. And I went with my family. That was the camp we came to before we were sponsored out to Minnesota. And that event just completely transformed what I was thinking I was going to do in graduate school.

Because I just I saw these banners saying, thank you, America. I saw the kind of recreation of the refugee camps in the space of a still active Marine base. I saw all these decommissioned.

military equipment from the Vietnam War, just lying around. And just I just the the the whole thing was just so disorienting that I wanted to sit with that. And so that's how I ended up doing the work, but not necessarily, again, because I wanted to become a professor. I again, I just went to graduate school because I liked learning stuff. I've always liked writing. I

had always intended on becoming some kind of writer. But at some point in high school, I realized that my chosen genre of young adult fantasy and science fiction, I was no good at writing at all. Everything sounded so derivative. And

And so it was really punk that gave me my first radical political education and also gave me a passion about the things I wanted to write about. Like from punk, I learned about capitalism.

the Reagan administration's covert wars in Central America and supportive genocidal dictators through the School of Americas and things like that. And that's really what

set me on the path that I am on now and still am. So, yeah, it was kind of, it was kind of a combination of, again, like, being inspired, being inspired by my, my time as a teenage punk rocker and, you know,

And not wanting to get a job, like I did nine to five. And then it turned out that I actually really liked teaching once I was doing it in graduate school. So it was kind of accidental, honestly. I feel like a lot of our journeys to academia are accidental. At least I see a lot of my own journey in yours in terms of there's a kind of lapse to the

path. And I encourage listeners to check out your history of writing on punk too, which is incredible. So maybe we can dive into talking a bit about the promise of beauty. So let's start with beauty itself. Beauty takes on kind of many roles in this book. You describe it as both a kind of method and a promise.

And one that often carries contradictions. So beauty can provide comfort during disaster, but it also serves to justify domination. It can symbolize freedom, but it also disciplines and controls bodies. It offers hope, but it can also mask violence.

And interestingly, you also talk about how beauty sort of structures historical narratives and shapes ideas of preservation, though its meanings are always contested. So it's more than aesthetics, right? It's a way of interpreting life, you say, time and politics. So two interrelated questions. Why beauty and what brought you to these ideas? Yeah, you know, um,

I think the first thing I want to say is about like crisis, because the reason why I came to the question of beauty was in thinking about about crisis first. Right. And there's that quote by Antonio Gramsci, like the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. Right.

In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. So this idea of these morbid symptoms of a dying political order, how it's described as a crisis, like that quote has always really been with me, like thinking about what are we talking about when we see all these crises around us?

And so it seems perhaps odd to think about beauty in times of crisis. But I think it's because that crisis, these dying regimes that are like sort of beset by their by legitimation and other kinds of crises of their own making, spawning like all kinds of atrocities and new forms of terror.

also presents an opportunity for thinking about like what new relations are not yet realized or have not yet been born. And I think in this moment, as in others before ours, you know, I, when I think about why beauty, you know, I think it is really difficult to square the enormity of all these crises with this question of beauty. And this is something that I think, you know,

I've struggled with the entire time I was writing the book. Like, why, why am I writing about beauty in the context of all the things that are unfolding in the world? All my friends and colleagues are writing about state sanctioned violence and settler colonialism and at war and empire. And I'm writing this book on beauty and,

But I think it was because of all those things that I want, that I started thinking about beauty in the first place to try to figure out like why there were so many invocations of beauty in times of crisis. Like there was something that I kept seeing over the course of, you know, doing the work on thinking about war and empire and, and, and,

state-sanctioned violence, I kept seeing these invocations of beauty as a balm, as a habit, a force that could make clear a space in the context of those crises and catastrophes. So I wanted to think about like

what is beauty doing in these situations? What is the, is the promise of beauty ever always just like, you know, a morbid symptom, uh, it's invocation. Is it always just a morbid symptom of this dying regime or is it, or could it actually, um, tell us something about the, this new world that is struggling to be born? Um, so, you know, what, what, what comes out of the book for me, why beauty is that, um,

It's a habit, a force, a way of being in the world, a method through which we engage these narratives of crisis. You know, especially where crisis is the name of an ongoing condition.

that coheres or collapses within these kinds of intensified situations, right? Because crises don't just come out of nowhere. They're ongoing conditions, right? And the way with crises are often narrated is through this kind of threat of the survival of something that we hold dear or precious to us, which is so often the life of something that is named beautiful, right? It's like

or birds or coral reefs or the glaciers or democracy and the kind of discrepancy between the world and what ought to be, which is so fundamental to an idea of historical consciousness. And

So these things unfold through the invocation of this beautiful thing whose presence, whose continued presence amongst us is threatened. And I thought that was really striking in these moments that I encountered over the 20 years I've been working on this book on and off. I just kept seeing it over and over again, this kind of invocation of beauty, but

Being called on for different cross purposes, right? In the name of death, in the name of the love of life. So I really wanted to think about, you know, how the promise of beauty is actually a very practical concern about a very imprecise world.

which is how to, like, what is the life that can be lived in crisis, right? In a catastrophe and as everything is falling apart around us. And so I really wanted to think about, you know, how and why the promise of beauty was so portable across different kinds of political claims, whether imperial or insurgent, right?

how in the sort of confrontation with crisis and terror and disaster, the promise of beauty is, it gives us some kind of way to sort of evaluate the principles or claims or conditions for, again, like the life that can be lived in, and what else could we imagine that

that we need, what like new forms, new structures, new truths for living on does the promise of beauty also make possible? So yeah, so that's, you know, I really, so for me, I think that I came to the question of beauty, because I think it

helps us to understand how we talk about the violences of empire and law and crises and how we evaluate a life that we might want to live otherwise. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And it's incredible.

Thank you for that sort of expansive and rich introduction. I hear already in what you're saying the way in which you think about sort of beauty, not just as a mechanism by which we distribute value, but also a way of organizing sort of time and history. And I'd love to come back to that. But before we dig deeper into the book, maybe we can frame a little bit this project in relationship to

to your first book project. Your first solo authored book was about freedom's kind of contingent relation to debt. This one investigates beauty's connection to crisis, as you shared. So I'm, you're, you're,

solo book projects have sort of focused on these kinds of twin concepts that is a kind of idea or maybe ideal and the usually violent thing that upholds it. So how is there a relationship or what is the relationship between your first book on freedom and debt called The Game, you know, and this one on beauty and crisis?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the two books are very much related in terms of like, you know, how I frame all my research questions, which is really like, what are the things that are given to us or taught to us as things that we should necessarily want for a good life, right? Whether it's freedom or beauty or laws or marriage or babies or whatever, right? And what are all these things doing beyond what they claim to do, right? Yeah.

So if the first book was thinking about how U.S. empire liberalism violence presumes to grant to others this gift of freedom where they're imagined to not have it.

And how that is necessarily concurrent with the kind of imposition of unending debt for that gift, one that can be then taken away or pressure, you know, used to pressure those who have quote unquote received the gift, whether or not they wanted it. I think that's very present in this present in this moment as well in terms of the impact

how precarious this gift of freedom really is for many of people who, again, who have supposedly received it. We're seeing it being taken away quite easily. You know, so I think that they are, there, there, there are two projects that definitely grew up together. You know, the first,

inkling of the second book came to me as a graduate student as I was writing my dissertation that became The Gift of Freedom where you know and they're both preoccupied with war and empire I mean I've started writing both of them in the context of the war on terror on the US war on terror and

And I am I was really struck by all these things, again, that are presumably the properties of liberal democracy, Western civilization, you

And the kinds of violences that upheld both of them. These were both practices, right? That the gift, like the act of the gift of freedom and the

active nature of the promise of beauty where of course you know you can't you when you're making a promise you're you're diagnosing that something is missing in the present um uh missing or partial or unfulfilled and that you then promise to make that thing present um

in the future, right? These are both actions, right? They're actions that take place in time and space, giving the gift of freedom, promising beauty. And yet there are these whole infrastructures that need to be in place for the gift of freedom and the promise of beauty to be kept.

And so in that way,

Yeah, there are very related projects because they're interested in these things that seem just kind of like rhetorical devices or cliches, right? The promise of beauty, gift of freedom. These seem like cliches. They seem like just beautiful, like lovely phrases that disguise something else. But actually, I think that those phrases, again, the gift of freedom and the promise of beauty are actually doing things. They're like

actively doing things. They're practices that, and they're practices that claim to resolve a crisis.

Right. The absence of freedom, the absence of beauty. So they are really related in that way. And, you know, so in thinking about like, you know, why is the second book, The Promise of Beauty after The Gift of Freedom?

To me, they were always connected. Right. You know, I start the gift of freedom talking about this Rose Parade float that I saw in I can't remember the early 2000s where it's this Vietnamese American parade.

parade float that says thank you America and and it's like this beautiful profusion of roses and stuff like that so I was like what is what is what is this doing like what is it doing what is this what is this beautiful what is this gift of freedom why is it because why is it becoming why is it aesthetically presented as this beautiful thing right um so uh again like you know the promise of beauty makes a lot of sense to me as a follow-up to the gift of freedom because I

Wanted to pursue this inquiry into the promise of beauty over others that might seem more obvious for someone whose scholarship as in general is, is basic is concerned so much with war and empire and aesthetics and state sanctioned violence. Um,

And it was in writing and researching about all these awful death-loving things that I first encountered the promise of beauty as an object or a feeling or an imagined path for living on that helps us to endure the kind of absence of freedom or safety or love. And I wanted to take seriously, like, what is beauty doing in the midst of a minefield or a refugee camp?

in a ruin and other kinds of forms of diminished life living, right? I wanted to really think about what is the promise of beauty doing in these spaces? Yeah. Yeah.

That's incredible. Thank you so much. And for both of these books, which are really sort of rich interventions for ethnic studies, critical refugee studies, American studies, gender studies, it is particularly the refugee. I'm thinking to myself that in both projects, in addition to U.S. Empire, that are sort of central analytics, particularly the refugee as a figure of both

debt and freedom in your first book project. And here it is often the refugee that emerges as both a kind of subject of crisis, but also a beauty of sort of these possibilities of liberal rescue. So maybe we can dig into sort of the architecture of the book now. So broadly speaking, the book's chapters sort of asks who

who beauty serves, what it hides, and what it enables. So for listeners who haven't yet read The Promise of Beauty, could you walk us through the book's structure and methodology? How do you approach beauty as a method? And how do you assemble and organize what is really just an impressive, stunning archive? So I am an interdisciplinary scholar. I've never had a discipline. Mm-hmm.

So the archive in part comes from my anxiety about being interdisciplinary. Like I just felt like I had to read every single possible thing. But also as an interdisciplinary scholar, I feel like every possible thing

sense to look into. So I like, yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, I sometimes I look at my own archive and I'm like, what was that? Like, what, how did I absorb any of this? It's just so much. So yeah, the, the, the structure of the book really is, you know, me trying to figure out

what is beauty doing in all these different situations? What is the promise of beauty doing in all these situations? So, you know, and that followed from, you know, trying to figure out what exactly anybody meant when they said something was beautiful. But obviously there's no one answer for what is beautiful. There are thousands of often conflicting definitions or understandings of, of whether beauty is a property or a quality or a sensation. And,

Beauty does not speak for itself. It solicits all of us to speak of it a lot to each other. It names personal and communal sensoria,

there's all these kinds of ways of assembling knowledge about beauty and the event of knowledge about beauty, its encounter, our encounters with it. And so, you know, as I wrote in the book, that there are many genres of beauty that appear throughout the world around us.

whether as, this is a quote from the book, whether as an emergent truth or as the kind of purest possibility as a false idol or a fascist country. So given that there wasn't any kind of particular definition of beauty that I felt made sense, what I wanted to do instead was really think about what is beauty like doing, right? Without landing on any particular definition of beauty beyond that which,

tells us something about the life that can be lived, right? Which is the broadest possible definition of beauty. Um, and helped me to get at what is it that beauty is doing? What is beauty's promise? What do we promise to beauty as well? Right. Beauty also solicits, uh, presumably in sort of narrativizations of it, like it solicits us to act on its behalf as well. Um, and,

And one of the first things that solicits is, of course, it's judgment, right? Asking whether this or that is beautiful. And relatedly, is this person or another able to perceive beauty as I do? So beauty's judgment is not just about the thing itself.

I found, but also about the grounds for beauty's flourishing or it's fading, which is also a judgment about a historical situation. So for me, I think that to think about beauty as method is to understand that beauty only makes sense as a concept from within the world, vital to how we move through our everyday lives, how we experience its presence or its absence with or against others.

And once I started thinking about it that way and I started collecting like any iteration of beauty that I found, the archive did feel really infinite.

And I think the introduction really reflects this to sometimes a very dizzying degree. And I wanted to kind of, in the introduction, reproduce that my own experience of encountering beauty in so many different iterations throughout so many different worlds.

mediums. And so, you know, the introduction, I think I did my best to kind of reproduce this kind of enormity of the promise of beauty and the promises that we make to it. And yeah, so that's how I really thought about the introduction as a place to collect and

All these iterations of beauty where it coexists alongside destruction and horror and despair and death.

as well as joy and life living and its kind of temporal elements. It's the question of its presence as well as its absence, how beauty is both understood at times to be like this arrestingly transcendent experience of

And also as something that's really inadequate in terms of actually transforming our sort of historical sense of the world. Right. You know, there are this there's so much just so many ways in which we.

Beauty was imagined to both secure but also disturb, you know, our description of life living, our evaluation and arguments about life living. And so what also came out of the book, writing the book for me, is that the promise of beauty is always a partisan promise, right? Because it has to take place in the world, it is, and it is,

offers a kind of diagnostic, right? It's not just a descriptive category, I argue, because it's a promise, right? A promise is the promise of something else to come, right? So it's not just a descriptive category. Beauty is not just a descriptive category. It's also, as a promise, a diagnostic one, right? So it...

as I think I've mentioned, it gestures towards those conditions that render beauty possible and perceptible at the same time that it's gestures towards or is directed toward a future tense, right? In which, um,

this beautiful thing, whether it's a person, an object, a habit, or a world, a life world, imparts some kind of sense of life being furthered, right, in Kant's formulation, which is the one thing I do take from Kant is that life presents a feeling of life being, beauty presents a feeling of life being furthered. And so the objects of the book are really,

organized around different ways in which the promise of beauty and the promises we make to beauty to preserve its presence, secure its presence, to resolve its absence into the future. The chapters are organized around different ways in which that promise might be fulfilled.

Thank you. I think the introduction, which is a lot of what you've described here, I mean, it's written really beautifully. There's like a kind of archival poetics or something about it. There are times when it even exceeds the kind of academic first that we're used to. I read the introduction twice and I encourage people to. I think it deserves multiple readings.

And in part, I imagine this kind of, I'm calling it an archival poetics. I don't actually know what that means, but like the way in which you collect all of these kinds of iterations of beauty.

I mean, it is massive. And I think that fulfills what you are saying, that this idea is sort of everywhere. Did you have like sort of methodological challenges or sort of challenges in terms of writing, given this archive? Yeah, writing this is really hard. Yeah.

Yeah, it was really hard to try to figure out, like, how do I hold all these very different iterations? Like, how do I make sense of all these iterations of the promise of beauty as well as the promises that we make to it? The ways in which the promise of beauty is mobilized as a kind of evaluation of beauty.

Again, like the present of possible life living, especially in terms of in times of crisis and catastrophe. Like, you know, I remember...

you know, like reading during the COVID-19 pandemic or the beginning parts of it because it's not over. All these, you know, we heard, we saw all the, we all saw the videos of people singing to each other from their balconies of creating these kinds of moments to interrupt the seeming endlessness and uncertainty of, of, of,

a global pandemic, right? We saw iterations of, you know, in our social media feeds, people saying things like, you know, post a piece of artwork so that we can affectively shift our feeds to remember that life is, that life living is possible even in the context of this crisis, right? And

So, yeah, I wanted to figure out how to hold all these different iterations of these encounters with beauty in times of crisis that were in that moment unresolved and uncertain, you know, and where the feeling of a future felt suspended. What was the promise of beauty in

promising um about a future that could be imagined in the context of all this instability uh this um the kind of suspension of of of life living um in the midst of all this death and it just you know really and and you know resonated with um moments that i've collected from

you know, accounts of war, accounts of being a refugee, accounts of, you know, even the sort of more personal, intimate forms of violence and despair, like the death of a loved one, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, it was really a challenge to figure out how to hold all those things together with and how I've

How we decided to do it was to really kind of break down the structure of the concept of the promise of beauty. So that would be, and to use all those examples to illustrate that structure of the promise of beauty. So I, you know, that's why I talk about like, what is, if beauty is so expansive as just whatever, you know,

induces us in us a feeling of life being furthered um then i needed to think about what the promise was doing like what is a promise doing um who can make promises what does it mean to keep a promise uh what is uh you know derrida talks about how the promise must promise to be kept and that involves creating new forms new events new structures um and then uh the other part of that um

Promise is then to make something present, right? So I was thinking about presence. What does it mean for something to have presence, which is a temporal as well as a spatial concept. So that's how I decided to structure, to really get into, to really theorize the structure of the promise of beauty as a concept and

that would help me then to hold together all these very disparate examples from a very infinite archive.

Mm-hmm. And maybe we can rest now on a couple of examples to show the way in which your sort of analysis is both sort of expansive, but very, very deep and precise too in each of the chapters or case studies. So I'm going to selfishly choose two case studies that interest me. So I'm interested in chapters two and three, where you examine beauty as a form of

biopower within U.S. empire. So in the second, you're looking at a beauty as humanitarian imperialism, essentially, in the context of the war on terror and specifically U.S. gender development projects seeking to rescue women's beauty in Afghanistan.

essentially framing Western aesthetics as a kind of racialized measure of civilization. And then the third discusses beauty as a human right in Cambodia's Miss Landmines pageant, where you say recognition through beauty replaces demands for justice or reparations. So these chapters follow one another.

And I can tell you're imagining a relation between them. So could you discuss each and how you envision their relationship? Yeah. I mean, the first three chapters is, you know, very specifically are thinking about, again, sort of how the promise of beauty might be fulfilled. Like what are the practices that make that promise fulfilled?

Right. So the first chapter is thinking about copy. That's often like the first thing people turn to as like, how do you, what is, what is it that beauty induces in us is a desire to copy it. Right. This is, you know, you know, the very, one of the very first things that Elaine Scarry writes about on beauty and being just right, which is a set of lectures she gave at Yale. Yeah.

And we want to copy beauty and, and, and that is, you know, we, you know, take pictures of a beautiful thing so that we can remember our encounter with them. Even if those copies don't necessarily have the same sensory, don't give us exactly the same sensory experience as they encounter with the beautiful thing. Right. So we make copies. The other thing that really struck me about,

about, um, one of the practices that one of the practices that also makes promises to make beauty present is an education in beauty, right? I just made scare quotes, which no one can see but you, um, but an education in beauty, which has been so much a part of, um, the sort of liberal ecumenist, uh,

Western civilizational project, right? The imagination that an education in beauty is necessary for a civilizational development, right? So yeah, the chapter, the second chapter on an education in beauty is actually the very first chapter I started thinking about. And

In graduate school, during the ramp up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, I...

read an issue of Vogue magazine about this NGO called Beauty Without Borders, which is, of course, named after Doctors Without Borders, which is, you know, probably the most well-known international NGO that does humanitarian work. And about this NGO's opening a beauty school in Kabul after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. And

And this beauty school that was administered by American and British fashion industry and nonprofit professionals with a curriculum that sought to train Afghan women in quote unquote, the art and commerce of beauty. And there was, it was so interesting to me, this kind of, one of the things that I found really interesting,

about this NGO was how I reacted to

which is a lot of the way I reacted to the Miss Landmine pageant when I first heard about that. And I'll talk about that in a second. But I just remember I was just really struck by what Iranian-American feminist scholar Minu Moalem would call the sort of civilizational thinking that beauty and education and beauty would also be an education in democracy, right?

which was very much built into the language of the curriculum itself. Even as like this education in both beauty and relatedly supposedly democracy was ushered in by this very brutal military occupation. And so I found it so interesting to me when I would talk to people about

This NGO that people often, I think their first impulse is oftentimes to be very dismissive.

um of these of these of these initiatives um people felt the same way about um the Miss Landmine pageant too when I first started talking about it so the Miss Landmine pageant is it only ran twice first time in Angola the second time in Cambodia it's the brainchild of this Norwegian theater director um

Who wanted to bring, quote unquote, awareness about unexploded ordnance in in and and their effects on, you know, civilians who who are who are.

Victims of these unexploded or of these landmines that have been lying under the dirt for like a decade or more decades. Right. In some cases, but that are still, quote unquote, live and can still blow up. Right. So so so he wanted to bring awareness by holding these pageants up.

with landmine survivors who were missing limbs, usually the, you know, a leg or two, which of course are the parts that are closest to the ground where the landmine is buried. And, you know, I just remember there was so much outrage people had about the Miss Landmine pageant when I first started talking about it.

And I felt outraged, too, you know, and but I wanted to understand, like, what was my outrage about? What was my outrage about the beauty school in Kabul? What is my outrage about the Miss Landmine pageant? How do I take these things seriously as political projects that are that are doing something? They're not just kind of, you know.

I wanted to take them seriously as practices of empire that were not just sort of frivolous or initiatives because they're both backed by a whole liberal sensorium that

that again imagines that in the first instance that an education in beauty is also a civilizational education and in the second that beauty is a transcendent universal that all persons have a right to enjoy and I thought that was really interesting and I wanted to understand like I wanted to understand that

How in both instances, these imperial projects promised beauty as the transformation of a historical situation that was that empire put into place and then like empire created all this violence and then presumed to resolve it.

And I thought it was really interesting that beauty was the thing through which they might imagine that resolution would happen.

would come through. I don't know. I hope that made sense. That does make sense. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, the way you're talking about the way in which beauty sort of substitutes law, but also operates like akin to law or human rights you discussed. Yeah, yeah. And this alongside this kind of civilizational thinking where I think you write at one point that becoming beautiful corresponds to becoming human. Right. Within this kind of civilizational sort of notion of the human and then within this kind of legal regime of human rights.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, you know, there's a long history of aesthetic capacity being understood as commensurate with aesthetics.

the capacity for self-governance, for rational thinking, for all these things, right? They are often imagined together, you know, um, they, the kind of, um,

you know, Kant, Edmund Burke, so many others, Western philosophers have long argued that capacity to correctly observe and appreciate beauty is something reserved for civilized persons and that people in who are named barbaric, uncivilized, savage, quote unquote, are uncivilized.

incapable of appreciating beauty properly. And so it is absolutely very much caught up in that. And then also, you know, you know, the slogan of the Miss Landmine pageant is everyone has the right to be beautiful. And I thought that was really interesting because

Obviously, the right to be beautiful is not a political right in the juridical sense. You know, like it can't actually be legally recognized. And this is often the first objection that people have to the whole pageant as a whole. Like, you know, like what is beauty? What is the right to beauty really mean? Like it's not a property. Can we actually be protected or granted from the state? It doesn't meet any material needs, right?

But for me, in thinking about that slogan, I think it's so interesting and useful that it is a claim that adopts the aesthetic form of rights and gives us an opportunity to think about, as with the aesthetic education, what are liberalism's aesthetics? What does it render? How are certain kinds of...

needs or wants or understandings of humanity and the human, how are these aesthetically, uh, uh, perceived and, and, um, shaped in such a way that we are so, um, our political imagination that shapes our political imaginations, right. Um, and,

So, you know, it's because these claims adopt the aesthetic form of an education or of a right that I think it invites, it should invite serious study. Like it should be, like we should take it seriously because it's these aesthetic forms that organize and render intelligible what counts as humanity, right?

where we perceive the absence or presence of an education or rights as that which is necessary to transform a bare life into a social world, right? Mm-hmm.

So, you know, for me, in thinking about something like the Miss Landmine pageant, I think it's really interesting to think about how instead of reading the right to be beautiful against other kinds of rights claims, like whether for comparison or failure, I think reading it alongside the

other kinds of rights, I think helps us to think about how rightfulness and rightlessness, um, are also aesthetic properties are also aesthetic projects. Um, right. Where rightfulness is this kind of horizon of normativity. Um, and, uh,

And rightlessness is imagined as this kind of nakedness before the law. Like, what is what does it mean to these are all aesthetic things.

arguments right um so i think it's really useful to think about i think i think the fact that um uh beauty makes itself intelligible as an education or as a right uh tells us again a lot about what it says about the possibilities of life living in the world as we know it within it right yeah it's really powerful and particularly um so thinking about this um

of beauty or a beauty as sort of making legible what is, or making something politically legible. I think your chapter on so-called ruin porn will help visualize this for folks that haven't read the book yet. So you ask in your chapter on so-called ruin porn, you ask whether aesthetic images of devastation help make destruction visible.

comprehensible or whether they, as you say, sort of reduce suffering to something kind of like passive and consumable. So I was thinking about your chapter in relation to a recent image. I mean, we're surrounded by images of devastation constantly, but particularly in this in this moment.

I was your recent image went viral of Dr. Hassan Abu Safi, the Palestinian physician who was detained by Israeli defense forces after he refused to abandon his patients and colleagues at a hospital. So the photo for listeners is is one that sort of frames him.

And he's wearing his medical coat. He's walking through debris and wreckage toward massive Israeli tanks. And it circulated all over news and social media as an as an image of heroism, as the beauty of one man's bravery and persistence against terrorism.

Like literally the machines is the most powerful allied forces in the world. And even as the kind of the carnage proceeded in present tense, many people understandably describe this image like others before it as iconic, as historical. So I'm thinking about the way in which you talk about beauty and historicity and essentially what would mark for future generations of people's resistance to genocide. Exactly.

And in this case, I think the assumption or the hope is that the future is going to redeem the present. Even Palestine is still a kind of political question, no matter how much photographic evidence of ruin, of erasure, of genocide that we have. On the other hand, some folks critique to the image as aestheticizing Palestinian resistance within kind of against international institutions'

of apathy and erasure. So could you first maybe describe your chapter's argument about the paradox of ruined porn and maybe how it relates to sort of these kinds of continuous efforts to render visible those catastrophes that are, that are like repeatedly denied, no matter how many images exist.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's exactly what I wanted to think about with this chapter on beauty's ruin or as a failure, right? You know, so for me, this chapter started with the kind of outrage people had about this landmine pageant when I was first starting to present it.

um, uh, some of the work that some of the initial work on, on the book, um, where, uh, I, I realized I really needed to address the complaint about beauty failure. Um, uh, because that was often kind of the response to the Miss Landmine pageant was like, oh, so is, is beauty has failed in this instance. Right. So I wanted to ask like,

what is happening when beauty is accused of failure, right? Where beauty is accused of being a deception, a lie, a mere surface, among other kinds of accusations. And I wanted to understand the sort of premises of this accusation. What is beauty's failure measured against? Like what would be successful, right? And oftentimes I found

Where beauty was specifically named as having failed was in, again, moments of crisis where crisis is imagined to provide an event of knowledge, right? Where we can, we see, you know, Lauren Berlant calls it like a glitch in the reproduction of life, right?

Gayatri Spivak calls, says that it's where the contradictions of become too obvious, right?

So and produces a different kind of sense or a different set of different kind of different knowledge about the ongoing conditions. Right. So where crisis is described as this kind of event of knowledge that demands from us clarity or reflection or calculation, right.

beauty is named as an obstacle to those things that we supposedly need in order to meet a crisis. Right. So, you know, this is where the idea that, you know, what can beauty really do for our sensemaking of terror and crisis? What is it like? What does it really do? What can it really tell us about anything? Right. There's this kind of desire for beauty to tell us something. Right. To give us new knowledge and,

that might be useful somehow, right? So I found it really interesting how like the absence of beauty is narrated as sort of evidence of devastation in our lives. If we don't have beauty in our lives, like is life worth living? But also beauty is imagined as itself devastating, right? As unable to help us grasp beauty.

what is actually happening, right? So I wanted to think about this premise of beauty's failure and especially where it is sort of affectively condensed as pornographic, right? So we have all these terms like

humanitarian porn, poverty porn, or the subject of that chapter, my fourth chapter, ruin porn, right? Which is, of course, the images of post-industrial Detroit and or other cities in the United States. But Detroit is sort of like the exemplar of a lot of this discourse about ruin porn. And this kind of failure of these aesthetically well-crafted photographs,

to actually properly represent the decline of Detroit after neoliberalism sets in under the stranglehold of racial capital and how these images are described as pornographic, right? Where the pornographic is understood to sort of name the threat

of what is actually possible to be apprehended through the senses of a beautiful aesthetically well-made thing right um that um that um that's the the beauty's failure in this instance um

leads to moral apathy or intellectual stilification or um and it frustrates you know a sort of more um straightforward sociological explanation or historicization of a of a crisis um and so i really wanted to think about the sort of premise of this accusation um

where, you know, what is the accusation that this image of crisis, the accusation being that this image is not an event of knowledge, that it does not reveal anything about the conditions that led up to the creation of this image, right? That's the accusation that you can't tell what's happening. Yeah.

So I wanted to think about what, so I ended up thinking about like, what are sort of the evaluative criteria that are necessarily involved in the accusation of beauty's failure to provide an event of knowledge in an aesthetically well-made image of disaster and catastrophe? Yeah.

So with not necessarily looking at the catastrophe itself, I wanted to think about like, what is the accusation doing? Like, what is it like, what do we want from an image of catastrophe and crisis? And, and in calling something pornographic, you know, it doesn't just raise the dilemma of the very real possibility of bearing witness to history. Yeah.

you know, according to the complaint about these images is that they're ahistorical. Not only that they're ahistorical, but that they are, they keep us from acting, right? They, taking action in time to stop a thing. It suspends our faculty for a reason, right? That's the, that's why people go to the term pornographic, right? Because the pornographic is imagined to be an image of something that is

sensorily overwhelming or numbing at the same time. Right. So I wanted to think about like, what is this truly all there is to the pornographic? Is the pornographic necessarily at obstacle to sense making? And I want to think about how this complaint tells us a lot about the sort of liberal schemata for how we imagine knowledge making and

right, as where we hope for sort of an epistemological transparency or a proportionate response, as well as, you know, the aesthetics of that epistemological moment or event, right? And what it means for these to be

the sort of evaluative criteria for any given image that is, that appears aesthetically well-made, what is it doing? Like, what does it mean to evaluate this photograph according to what it does or does not do? So I wanted to really think about like, like how do, like, why are these the terms through which we evaluate these images?

And it keeps happening, right? All the images coming out of Gaza are subjected to the same kind of evaluative criteria. Like what is, can this image stop anything? Can it stop the bombs? Or is it just,

more content for our feeds, right? Is it just emotionally numbing or overwhelming? And what does that mean, right? So that's the kind of question I try to take up in that chapter. I don't think I resolve it, but I'm interested in asking why these criteria, like why these criteria for reading an image?

And especially if this is a sort of liberal sensorium that has not actually served us so far, how else might we approach these kinds of images and photographs and the crises that are pictured therein? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure it is resolvable, but I...

I'm wondering, like, it's hard not to think about this book in relationship to so much of Asian American and Black Studies aesthetics on eligibility right now, particularly since you're critiquing how beauty makes subjects visible to systems of

power rendering them kind of legible within um dominant frameworks of perception so is is um so i'm thinking about um scholarship on like opacity eligibility marronage um refusal etc uh is eligibility an anti-beauty politics or does it function within beauty's realms as you see it

I think that beauty's capaciousness means that it is whatever we need or think we need to live.

And absolutely, there are times in which whatever it is we need or we think we need is narrowly conceived through these very ideological frames or political norms that are drawn from an existing social order. What is already sensible, what is already legible to us and are and are given to us as as as the necessary components for a good life. Right. But I think.

And the ultimate argument of the book is that, you know, there are other times in which whatever it is that we need or we think we need is actually out of bounds. Right. It cannot be found in what we already what we know or think we know. And so.

So I do think that illegibility and opacity, withdrawal, refusal, all these things are also forms through which we might conceive of a life finally, a life worth living that can also be called beautiful. Like I think that it doesn't, I think if we're thinking about beauty capaciously as again, like whatever grants a feeling of life being furthered, then absolutely like withdrawal,

opacity, yeah, illegibility are other pathways

to the beautiful things that we need to live. Yeah. That's clarifying. So your epilogue does, I'm not going to call it a resolution, but it does produce a kind of path within beauty where you offer a kind of reimagining, I guess, of beauty as crime. Yeah.

And it seems that by crime, at least in the way that I'm reading it, is that you're not just pointing to beauty as having a kind of place between order and transgression, but you're proposing beauty as a kind of world-making, a world-making force entangled in power. And you call it a conjectural sociality, quote unquote. So crime, as I'm reading it here, is about possibility and is really beauty as crime is

Excuse me. Aligned with abolitionist thinking, it seems, both as kind of destructive and creative. So can you talk more about this idea? Excuse me again. What does what does it mean to think about beauty as crime? Yeah. Or to argue for doing more crime. So, yeah. So the book is you.

you know, arguing for beauty as this method to attend to questions of aesthetics and politics from within a history or histories of this world that is presently on fire. And, you know, in the epilogue, I ask, you know, if the promise of beauty is oftentimes a response to crisis and catastrophe, is there a way in which the promise of beauty can precipitate a crisis and

that makes life more livable for all of us, right? Not just for some. And, you know, there is, and I use this in the epilogue as well, but, you know, Jacques Ranciere talks about how what is called politics is actually the police and that politics is actually a break from the police and its organization of powers and their legitimation through, you know, rules and all those laws, right?

So, you know, we know beauty as police pretty well. Like it's oftentimes the kind of thing that we talk about all the time. Like, you know, people want to talk to me about beauty standards all the time.

and you know we can talk and it's definitely present in you know the second chapter about the beauty school in Kabul right where beauty is this kind of aesthetic arrangement of right forms for the achievement of a set of norms or an order but I yes I also think that beauty is a politics can be a politics in the sense that Ron Sierra talks about it as a break from the police and

um, that, uh, you know, so if beauty is whatever it is that we need to survive, you know, the enclosure and the howling void that surrounds us, um, um, and to build another world in which we have what we need to truly live. Um, you know, I, I, um,

I think that, you know, there's this, it's not in the book because I completely forgot about this one piece of like an archive that many people have told me about. So like multiple friends reminded me that they had told me about this sticker that Kurt Cobain from Nirvana put on his guitar. And the guitar says, and the sticker says, vandalism, beautiful as a rock in a cop's face. And so lots of people were telling me about this.

So probably kicking yourself. I'm totally kicking myself. Totally kicking myself. Instead, you know, I was thinking, you know, where I get Crime is Beauty from the tagline for John Waters film, Female Trouble. That's the tagline for the film. But also, you know, this...

This sticker, I think, is also really useful for thinking about, you know, how I want to end on thinking about crime as beauty, right? So if...

If I want to avoid reestablishing the authority of law and order in, you know, our struggles against them, where law and order are how we experience so much violence, then we have to distinguish law and order from justice. Mm-hmm.

Right. And then also crime from injustice, like crime and injustice are not the same. Right. So if law is, as Derrida puts it, like this general application of a rule and justice, as he again puts it, is the sort of opening of law to the other or is a singularity which the law cannot account for, then crime exists in this kind of

uh relation of alterity to law and order right um it opens up the discourse of law and order to an outside like what gets counted as a crime as we can see is very arbitrary crime is a social construct right uh so for a crime to be an opening then um to these other ways of being to these beautiful radiant other ways of being in the world that are now hunted and harassed uh

for it to count for the sort of singularity denied by law and order, it has to be different each time. It can't be the application of another rule called beautiful. It can't be the reiteration of the beautiful as lawful, orderly, symmetrical, or universal. It has to constantly reinvent the possibilities of life living. So to call vandalism and other crimes beautiful is...

I think really useful, um, for, uh, again, thinking about like what, what, what would actual, uh,

justice look like, right? If it is not the application of a law, of a rule, but some way of an opening to the singularity of every moment to every person, it is also an opening to a different way of conceiving life living, right?

And of course, you know, you know, this is the distinction between and I wrote this in the epilogue between a liberal sensorium that promises beauty as the object of its politics and a more radical one that promises politics as the object of beauty if politics is the end of the police. Right. So to fulfill this promise of beauty has to involve like reordering politics.

the sensible, right? Again, that's a Roncier thing, which will require breaking these other social bonds that have thus far not actually cultivated the kind of life living that we would necessarily want to see for everyone. Right. And so for me, I do want life living for everyone. I want, I want that kind of singularity of justice for everyone. I think I,

And that is a crime under a current social order that divides people into those who are deserving and those who are not. Those are human and those who are not. And that conceive of everything outside of the bounds of these norms and these rules to be disposable, to be...

available to be killed, kidnapped,

kidnapped, murdered, imprisoned, all of that stuff. Right. So, uh, yeah, absolutely. You know, there, there, we have these, all these contractual agreements upon which our social, our existing social order depends upon that have nonetheless forfeited our trust and completely ravaged our world. So what would it mean to, uh, abandon these social bonds, uh, which is currently understood as a crime to do so, um, uh,

and, and do something and do and organize ourselves differently. Thank you. And that I think that would be beautiful. I would love to see us organize ourselves differently, where everyone has what they need. Here, here. And yeah, I mean, it's an interesting time to think about the, the crime as you're as you're describing it, and as organizers have for a while, particularly in this moment, under this administration, so much of

the conversation about transgression has like sort of reverted to this notion of kind of recovering liberal laws, equity or equity, constitutional norms, et cetera. None of which, you know, as you said, yeah, ever been equitable or stable. Yeah. So maybe we could, yeah.

uh, uh, conclude here by thinking a little bit about, um, I mean, there's always a kind of requisite question about discipline in network and, um, uh, and, uh, your book really sort of exceeds these, uh, these disciplinary kinds of norms, including the ones under which we, uh, organize new books network episodes. So we are recording for the Asian American, uh, studies and gender studies, um, uh, uh, uh,

sort of filed under New Book Network. And these are two fields that kind of mark your own professional trajectory within universities, albeit the book and your arc of scholarship both sort of push against and exceed them. So will you discuss the promise of beauty in relation to either these disciplines or like the idea or the form of discipline, if you prefer? Yeah, I mean, I don't imagine myself as having a discipline at

As much as kind of like fields of inquiry. So in intellectual genealogy. So my intellectual genealogies are obviously very obviously feminist theories. Probably, you know, to be more specific, like transnational feminist cultural studies and ethnic studies. So I think of both of those as my intellectual genealogies that inform my

um, how I ask questions. Um, so for me, when I think about disciplines, I think, um, as someone who is interdisciplinary, I think that both these fields of inquiry have taught me how to ask questions. Um, and I think that becomes really clear in, uh, I think it's clear in both all my work, right. Um, the kinds of ways in which I ask the questions, um, and, uh,

You know, often the questions that I'm asking in both those projects are questions also about why we have certain conventions for asking questions in a particular way in the first place. Right. So, you know, that's why, you know, one of the things that really drove me to think about the promise of beauty is.

the question I often received when I started talking about the different case studies, which is again, like why, like what is like, why does beauty matter in the situation? Like it doesn't like it's so it's frivolous. It's, it's a, it's a kind of second order consequence of these like other forces. It's, it's, it's a surface. It's, it's,

It's just the aesthetics, but it's not actually a material condition. And I wanted to sort of push back on these kinds of what I felt were sort of conventions of asking questions.

why something matters, like what are the stakes, right? So, and I learned how to do that from feminist theory and ethnic studies, right? To ask different sets of questions, right?

about the things that we, about the world, right? About the things we encounter in the world, about the things that, the conditions through which we encounter each other in the world, right? So I wanted to think about other ways of asking questions. So I, that's what I would say about like,

how the promise of beauty is related to these disciplines, even if like, it doesn't seem explicit, like, you know, the gift of freedom. I think some people were very confused because it's not about quote unquote women. If they were like, how is this a feminist project? I'm like, it's, it's all through it. It's the way that I ask the questions. It's the way from the inquiries that is, is it has everything to do with my, my,

intellectual genealogies in these fields. Thank you so much. Can I ask, we have just a bit of time, what are you working on now? Or of the many things you're working on, what would you like to share with us? The thing I'm working on now is a collection of my punk writing. Amazing. Yeah, I'm very excited. I'm

two friends of mine who are also former coordinators of maximum rock and roll, which was the longest running punk magazine based in San Francisco. Uh, two of my friends who were, who were, um, former coordinators of the, of the magazine, um, are want to do a book series of writings by punk women. Um, so, uh, I get to be the first experiment in this project. Um, and,

um so yeah so I'm you know working on editing a bunch of my old columns that I wrote for different punk magazines um my academic essays that are uh grappling with um uh the history of punk uh in the ways in which I've been invoked in those as well um

are going to be included. So, and I'm writing an intro, I'm trying to figure out the introduction to this. Now I have to get my brain into a different kind of writing mode, um, to write about my, my punk, my punk writing. Um, but yeah, so I'm, I don't know what it's called yet. Uh, we haven't come up with a thing, um, with a name or title. Um, but that's the next thing I'm working on the collection of my punk writing, which I'm really excited about, uh, actually, um,

You know, Jan Radway is working on a book on zines and their afterlives. And, you know, there was this moment where she came to my campus and gave a talk. And I was caught by surprise when she mentioned my zines as a part of my intellectual trajectory book.

And I like I remember I was pre-tenure, so I was just like under so much stress from like wanting to meet the stupid institutional metrics for keeping my job and having a paycheck and health insurance. And to hear her talk about my zines as a part of my intellectual trajectory was so moving. I started crying right there in the theater just because like I had a whole intellectual life before I became an academic. And I...

And some of those things that I wrote for other punks are super meaningful to me. So I'm really happy to be working on that project. I mean, as somebody who cites your puns genealogy, I'm surprised you haven't seen it that way. And I'm happy that you're having this moment and this retrospective. Where can we read this work when it comes out?

Um, I think it will be out on. So one of the co-editor, one of the one of the folks, I guess, the co-editors of the collection is is Grace Ambrose, and she just put out a book called

last year on, um, this, uh, all women punk band called, uh, Lily put slash Kleenex. Uh, they had to change their name to Lily put because Kleenex threatened to sue them. Um,

But she just put out a book by them and it's on her label called Thrilling Living. So I imagine it will be on Thrilling Living. You know, I went with I wanted to do it with punks for the punks instead of with other presses, although other presses did ask me to do that.

a collection like this, but I was like, no, I got to do it for the pumps. So, yeah. So, it will probably be on Thrilling Living, I imagine, unless they come up with a whole new imprint for themselves for this series. So, I don't know. But I figure it will probably be at least...

listed or named on Thrilling Living. Incredible. Yay. Okay. We'll look for that. Thank you, Mimi, for this clarifying conversation, for your incredible history of work, and for sharing with the world how to think with the promise of beauty. Thank you. Thank you for your question and

According to Saltus Wealth, 41% of high net worth individuals report having been victims of financial crime. Are you next? High profile individuals like you need more than off the shelf solutions. You need concierge digital security from Reputation Defender. It's not just another app.

It's a team of experts using best-in-class tools to protect you and your family, covering virtually every aspect of your digital life. Visit reputationdefender.com slash success to learn more. That's reputationdefender.com slash success.