Decoloniality, Identity, and Aesthetic Publicity

This essay explores how the decolonial practices of Latina poet Alicia Borinsky in Frivolous Women and Other Sinners (2009) and British filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien in Lessons of the Hour (2019) occasion open-ended conceptions of the public that engage economic and technological developments in tandem with questions of individual encounters, objects, and values. Their figurations point beyond the domain of aesthesis to a view of aesthetic publicity on which unprecedented social identities emerge through interactions among multiple, often mutually opposed platforms and assemblies. The essay offers working definitions of aesthetic publicity and decolonial aesthetics, and continues by scrutinizing the functions of aesthetic norms and public spaces in Stuart Hall’s decolonial cultural theory. Investigating these functions in Borinsky and Julien and signaling how publicity produces mobilities and consolidations, tensions, impurities and interminglings, the essay underscores how a decolonial account that aims to acknowledge the complexities of identity should ascribe a central role to the operations of aesthetic publicity.