September 2023 - August 2024

Post-Global Aesthetics

Drawing on an engagement with contemporary literature, film, and visual art, this project seeks to examine the conditions of possibility for a ‘post-global aesthetics’. Against an understanding of globality as a feature of radical systemic integration, it analyzes the role of contemporary cultural production both in interrogating the conceptual, epistemological and socio-political strictures of the paradigm of the globe-as-one and in instantiating new forms of inhabiting a shared planet. How, it asks, can works of art address legitimate grievances about the social, political and environmental depredations of a globalized world without reverting to the identitarian, nationalist or hetero-patriarchal logic of a merely anti-global thinking? And how can they attend to the differential histories of human life on planet Earth while eschewing the presumptions of a Eurocentric or falsely universalist species-talk? A ‘post-global aesthetics’, in this context, emerges as a domain of difference, ecological diversity, pluriversal entanglements, and heterogeneous space-time relationships through which new forms of a ‘planetary relationality’ become imaginable.

Located at the interstices of cultural and aesthetic theory, political philosophy, and the environmental humanities, the project – while grounded in detailed analyses of specific works of art – also provides a critical examination of key discourses that have shaped recent discussions in the interdisciplinary humanities, including those of transculturality, planetarity, decoloniality, cosmopolitics, world literature, epistemologies of the South, and the Anthropocene.

Alexis Radisoglou is Assistant Professor in German Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, UK. He holds a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in German and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York. Before joining Durham, from 2016-2019 he was Montgomery-DAAD Fellow in German Literature at Lincoln College in the University of Oxford.

 Kontakt: alexis.radisoglou@durham.ac.uk