Before Beauty

A critical revision of philosophical aesthetics from the vantage point of ongoing anticolonial struggles.

While the poets and thinkers of the Enlightenment claimed that before beauty, all humans would be free and equal, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz contends there is an unwritten history of philosophical aesthetics that is interlinked with sixteenth-century colonialism and the emergence of global capitalism.

As Cruz argues in Before Beauty, we won't be able to understand the conflicting histories of aesthetics without recognizing the impact that the colonial economy--and the racial categories it engendered--had on European perceptions of beauty. Nor will we be able to assume political responsibility when appreciating a work of art without acknowledging the claims for self-determination, justice, and reparations by Indigenous and Afrodiasporic people in Latin America and the Caribbean at the beginning of the twenty-first century.