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 express 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 “world‑class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed 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 India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.

Taking Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, this book explores the ways in which artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as an inescapable market logic that permeates aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life.

JISHA MENON is an associate professor of theater and performance studies at Stanford University, where she holds a courtesy appointment in comparative literature. She is the author of The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition. 

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in the Neoliberal City
2. Urban Striving: Panic, Precarity, and Property
3. Cosmopolitan Aspirations and the Call Center Worker 
4. Aspiring to Queer Globality: From Shame to Self Assertion
5. Libidinal Urbanism: Narcissism in the Noir City
6. Wasted: Consumer Desire and Its Detritus
Epilogue: Receptivity and Responsibility in the Neoliberal City
Notes 
Bibliography
Index