The Promise of Beauty

“Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Promise of Beauty analyzes so much more than the pleasures that beauty seems to promise. Rather, this exquisite and textured analysis of beauty’s conceptual past urges a turn to beauty as a method to interrogate the limits, conditions, and potential of the present, detaching beauty from its ideological debts to humanism and urging a reattachment not only to what Nguyen calls ‘the times between revolutions’ but also---in the everyday practices of knowing and making beauty---to the need to believe that revolution will come again.” - Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

“The Promise of Beauty is itself a thing of beauty---that is, something to be modeled, admired, and exemplified. By using beauty-as-method, Mimi Thi Nguyen both makes it possible to and enjoins us to acknowledge the world-making capacity of beauty—not because it will save us, but because our conceptions of the beautiful are tethered into what and who we value and what we’re willing to do to achieve such ends. In other words, Nguyen presses us to consider what we are for in the course of theorizing and studying the promise of beauty.” - Kandice Chuh, author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man”