Brutal Beauty

“A stirring and lyrical investigation into the engagement of theatre, performance, and aesthetic projects with the urban transformation of India in the context of neoliberal capitalism . . .  Significantly, Brutal Beauty challenges the reader to move beyond oppositional thinking in relation to contemporary artistic practice and subjectivity—as Menon argues, artists and artworks are enmeshed within consumer capitalist ideologies in ways that make it increasingly difficult to assign any politics of artistic exceptionalism to performance in contemporary capitalism. Rather, Menon beckons readers, with prose that is often dizzying yet adeptly nuanced, to fully immerse themselves within the complexities and contradictions of these landscapes. Brutal Beauty will resonate with a diverse interdisciplinary readership, including humanities and social sciences scholars and researchers in postcolonial theory, cultural geography, feminist and queer studies, and visual and performing arts.” —Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

“What is striking in Menon’s selection and analysis of artworks is the way in which they offer a new sensory perception of the urban by taking both the artists and the spectators through experiences that take them beyond their secure status as individuals, where the artists, rather than willfully ‘moulding’ the materials they use, foreground a process of ‘yielding to its sensuous vitality’ and their ‘particularity and historicity'. Menon thereby centres the durational, layered and meditative quality of works ‘as a prerequisite to a new understanding’ through critical reflection.” —Theatre Research International

“Brutal Beauty is a deeply interdisciplinary and rigorous account of how neoliberalism unfolds new urban subjectivities and relations . . . The book is a valuable addition to the emergent body of knowledge that explores the sensorium in Global South cities.” —Performance Research

“Jisha Menon’s Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India reminds us that above all neoliberalism is an aesthetic project. While sparing no details about new forms of economic and social precarity, Menon’s luxurious considerations and astute analyses of contemporary artworks and creative modes of living in postliberalized Indian urban centers remind us of how creative reimagining can transform even the most difficult economic and social realities into sites of possibility for dwelling differently. Menon’s concentration on the artworks, and particularly their materiality, is a welcome reprieve from overly determined readings of art under advanced capitalism, whose authors often ignore the complexity of neoliberalism and art made under its conditions.” —Patricia Ybarra, author of Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism (Northwestern University Press, 2018)

“A beautifully written and evocative book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India is attentive to material irruptions of aesthetic practices that bring history, memory, aspiration, nostalgia, and even reworked narcissism to bear on the overwhelming tide of contemporary capitalism. Across a variety of mediums, Menon deftly tracks the unruly and paradoxical intermingling of neoliberalism’s aesthetic enterprise with the sometimes resistant and possibly sacral powers of the supposedly obsolete.” —Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment

"Jisha Menon's book on the Indian city of Bangalore is remarkable for what it demonstrates: that neoliberal projects of urban transformation in developing nations end up creating new sites of intense and conflicting affect where everyday brutalities give birth to new and unexpected aesthetic possibilities and despair opens the door to new forms of the political. Meticulously researched and convincingly argued, this brilliant book will take its place among the very best in contemporary cultural studies of the Global South." —Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

“An ode to the aesthetics of India’s neoliberal cities, Brutal Beauty is a lyrical, incisive study of experimental performances ranging from call center theater to installations of e-waste. Menon, like the artists at the center of this book, offers a tactile, visual, olfactory encounter with globalization’s bodily echoes and erasures, and grounds these encounters in the politics of specific sites. This is one of the most important and expansive works on neoliberal India written in the past decade; it is required reading for anyone interested in performance, experimental art, and urban South Asia.” —Anna Schultz, author of Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism