Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; author of
Living Beautifully, or Resilience
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Published:September 2024
The fifth chapter centers a concept of living beautifully as an aesthetic form attenuating scenes of radical contingency to model how best to live on in catastrophic times. Living beautifully in this instance names the deliberate leaning toward freedom despite social or structural collapse, shaping our historical consciousness of time over (and sometimes against) an awareness of eventfulness. Weathering continuity and rupture, such beautiful resilience, as an affective adaptation to radical contingency, serializes dispersed events (even if those events are interior ones) and scripts a biography of strength after brokenness, a desirable history of doggedness despite misfortune. With the disintegration of modernity’s temporal order of progress and perfectibility, resilience, especially where it is also a promise of beauty, is one narrative response to irresolvable aporias in our experience of time.
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