Animated Wishes, Apocalyptic Dreams: Theses on Aesthetics & Politics in the 21st Century

Languages & Literature, First Floor

You turn a corner and an anime girl points like Lenin on a Red Army-style poster to the glorious communist future. You read and you're awash in the lexicon of gaming: NPCs, builds, lore. You play and you're immersed in utopian and dystopian fictions, in class struggles, or in frenetic fascist nightmares. Social and ecological crises haunt the bookshelves and the silver screen. An overjoyed Boris Johnson applauds the saddest rendition of God Save the King imaginable; Donald Trump dances to YMCA before berating his audience with baleful Andrea Bocelli arias.  You whisper to the ghosts of aesthetic theory's past: I don't think we're exactly in Weimar anymore. How does all this fit into the century old debates about aesthetics and politics? Expressionism and realism? Romanticism, constructivism, and futurism? In this talk, Ajay Singh Chaudhary will begin to make sense of the radical new political aesthetics of the our moment in a series of theses taking us across the strange, horrifying, and wonderful worlds of contemporary social imagination.  

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on social and political theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, political economy, political ecology, media, religion, and post-colonial studies. He has written for The Guardian, The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Hedgehog Review, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among other outlets. Ajay’s book on the politics of climate change, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, was published by Repeater Books in February, 2024.