Lessons of Belonging

Art, Place, and the Sea

Series: 

Prompting this book is the paradox of belonging. What pushes the author to write are art’s questions. Rather than take the route of writing, artists in academia could opt for the studio, teaching students, and occasionally indulge in conferences and symposia. However, beyond such rituals, writing art’s questions remains akin to art’s acts of belonging. In these lessons of belonging this is done through art’s paradox. Belonging is a matter of art because art belongs to the aporia that writes it.
Copyright Year:
2023
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-67898-9
Publication:
15 May 2023
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-67892-7
Publication:
18 May 2023
Paperback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-67891-0
Publication:
18 May 2023
Cover Lessons of Belonging

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"The profundity and scholarship of Baldacchino’s thoughts, coupled with the expanding horizons of his and other artist’s visual work ‘show’ us that belonging is always constituent, a force to originate or to instaur beyond established boundaries." – Dennis Atkinson, Goldsmiths University of London

"As in previous works, John Baldacchino’s artistic and philosophical writing challenges the readers to exit into the world. This exit is profoundly implied with today’s politics but also with history and ways of unlearning and imagining other futures for the arts and education." – Catarina Martins, University of Porto

"John Baldacchino’s latest work returns to familiar themes in his writings: the Mediterranean, longing, and art’s connection with the makings of possible pasts and futures. [He] take[s] readers on a journey in which art-making challenges us to grasp what we take for granted as the meaning of belonging." – Sandro Barros, Michigan State University
Acknowledgements
List of Figures

1 Nowhere: Recurrent Exits
 1 Art’s Pagan Intents
 2 Renegotiating Belonging
 3 The World, Autonomy, and Struggle

2 Scotland, Malta, Palestine: Indirect Belonging
 1 Art’s Thirdness
 2 Living Somewhere
 3 Indirectness, Be-Longing
 3 Assumptions of Making
 3 Rummiena, Rummeenah, Pomegranates

3 California, Armenia: A Métier for Living
 1 Presumed Space
 2 Finding Paradox
 3 Prosthetic Syntheses
 4 Shared Belonging(s)
 5 Exiting
 6 Impasse
 7 Synthetic Prosthesis
 8 The Dialectic’s Beyond
 9 Paradox’s Pedagogy
 10 Wounded by Water

4 Ghana, Crete, Andalusia: Aesthetic Dissonance
 1 White Liberal Tolerance
 2 Beyond Tolerance
 3 Recognition, Specificity, Distinction
 4 Aesthetics Contra Aesthetics

5 Harlem, Hellas, Yoruba, Auschwitz: Aesthetic Identity
 1 “We Have No Models”
 2 Learning to Pray
 3 ‘Our’ Contemporaneity
 3 The Child and the Tree

6 Paris, Prague: Art’s Foreignness
 1 Beauty’s Polity
 2 Normalised Deadly Phenomena
 2 An Excuse for Bildung’s Attraction
 2 Remembering to Forget
 2 Avant-Nostalgia’s Inverted Belonging
 2 Kundera’s Excuse

7 Alexandria, Monterosso: Nostalgic Salt
 1 Performances of Difference
 2 Before and after the Shipwreck
 2 Journey and Nostalgia
 2 Poetic-Pedagogical Hypotheses

8 Al-Baħr al-Abyad, ħa-Yam ħa-Tikhon, Mesógeios, Mediterraneo: Thalassic Lessons
 1 Vantage Points
 2 “This ‘Inland Sea’ of Ideals”
 3 Doing, Undergoing, and Living Deliberately
 4 Culture, Revolt and Colonised Economies
 5 An Aesthetic Sense of Belonging
 6 Lessons of Belonging

Readers interested the art, culture and education, particularly those focusing on race, the Mediterranean and post-colonial studies. This also includes aesthetics, political theory, cultural anthropology, and related interdiciplinary fields.
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Publisher:
Brill
Language:
English
Pages:
xiv, 159 pp.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004678989

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