Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India

Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India, by Professor Jisha Menon, Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life. Read more about the book >>

In conversation with Samer Al-Saber, Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and Usha Iyer, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University

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Jisha Menon, Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature, is the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division. She is a scholar of postcolonial theory and performance studies whose research interests lie at the intersection of law and performance; race and the carceral state; affect theory, cities, and capitalism; gender and sexuality; cosmopolitanism and nationalism. She is the author of the book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021), which considers the city and the self as aesthetic projects that are renovated in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms in India. Her first book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), examines the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. More information about Jisha Menon >>

Listen to Jisha Menon on the SASSpod, the Center for South Asia podcast >>

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