Brutal Beauty

Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India 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. Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that expresss a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of worldclass cities, urban citizens are also changingtransformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of Indias lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as arts capacity to absorb and critique liberalizations discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isnt just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.