This article examines two projects by artists living and working in Nairobi. It asks questions about how these artists are visualizing or otherwise materializing in their work the specificity of their contemporary geopolitical and geocultural situation in relation to capitalism. How might this specificity allow these artists to elucidate aspects of contemporary capitalism’s cultural logic that are all too often invisible to people living in other parts of the world? How might it allow them to reframe or gain new traction on what Fredric Jameson once called a “radical cultural politics,” an operation that presupposes, in much Marxist and post-Marxist analysis, an ability to represent one’s location within the system of contemporary capitalism?
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
June 1, 2016
Issue Editors
Research Article|
June 01 2016
Beyond the “NGO Aesthetic”
Jennifer Bajorek
Jennifer Bajorek
Jennifer Bajorek is assistant professor of comparative literature at Hampshire College and a research associate in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She teaches and writes on literature, philosophical aesthetics, and photography. She is the author of Counterfeit Capital (2009) and How to Write a Visual History of Liberation: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in Africa (forthcoming).
Search for other works by this author on:
Social Text (2016) 34 (2 (127)): 89–107.
Citation
Jennifer Bajorek; Beyond the “NGO Aesthetic”. Social Text 1 June 2016; 34 (2 (127)): 89–107. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3467990
Download citation file:
Advertisement