TY - JOUR
AU - Aquino, Jorge A
AB - The Aesthetics of Solidarity, by Nichole M. Flores, is an important work on US Latinx theological aesthetics, adding to a series of recent books seeking to bring out the political and activist dimensions of aesthetic practice. Flores tells the stories of several social movements, actions, and artistic productions touching Latinx communities, wiring them into a theory of democratic solidarity and action that takes the particular experiences of marginalized minority communities to heart. Along the way, Flores levels incisive critiques of liberal social-justice ethics, using a wide range of Latinx theological voices to expand the accounting of difference, particularity, and locality that liberal thought often leaves behind. At the center of her account is the apparition narrative of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the Virgin’s relationships with Juan Diego and other figures from the traditional Guadalupan stories. Flores constructs an aesthetics of solidarity rooted in attention to how the predicament of each personage in the story conditions their joint move to relationship. This relational account of the aesthetics of the narrative becomes a template for conceiving a vision of Latinx democratic action and solidarity in the face of daunting socio-economic realities—poverty, racist policing and incarceration, deportation, gentrification, and white supremacism. Chapter 1 unfolds a “political theology of Guadalupe and Juan Diego” around the story of a theater piece on the Guadalupan apparition, The Miracle at Tepeyac, written and directed by Anthony J. García. Flores emphasizes the cultural and political significations interlaced in García’s play, whose theme and presentation aroused controversy when it premiered in a Denver parish in 1975. Flores grounds her aesthetic reading of the play, linking Guadalupe’s “synchronic relationship with Juan Diego and her diachronic relationship with the members” of the latter-day Chicano parish depicted in the play. The play, and the controversy surrounding it, bring out the faultlines of division in the Latinx community—the institutional white Church, the Chicano movement, and ordinary Latinx Christians—while also serving as a touchstone for dialogue. Flores argues that Guadalupe holds promise for Latinx communities engaged in liberative projects as a symbol of solidarity and joint organizing across difference. In being selected by the Virgin for a crucial mission, Juan Diego, lowly conquered indigenous-Christian convert, recognizes his intrinsic human dignity and seizes his agency. Along the way, Flores offers a helpful framing of the thorny historical challenges of the Guadalupan narrative (in her section on “the Guadalupan controversy”). In the following two chapters, Flores takes up a potent critique of the liberal tradition’s account of justice, especially as represented in the work of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum. Rawls’s notion of democracy seeks to harmonize a situation of pluralism by filtering out the experiences of particular communities, forcing them to translate their local claims into the abstract language of a supposedly pluralist democratic commons. His notion of justice assigns both aesthetics and local, grass-roots practices and identities to a hinterlands category of “comprehensive doctrines” and background cultures. For Rawls, such background cultures militate against democratic pluralism by failing to speak a universalizing language that focuses the common story of democracy for all. Unfortunately, Flores notes, racialized communities suffer wounds and forms of oppression that have little traction in the larger liberal commons. The critique of Rawls is potent and important for Latinx religious thought. Flores takes up Martha Nussbaum as contributing more to a liberal aesthetics, with her nuanced account of the role of emotions as motivators for politics. Yet, Flores flags Nussbaum for repeating many of the gestures that Flores criticizes in Rawls. For example, both Rawls and Nussbaum interpret Martin Luther King’s monumental 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech as an exemplary case of a rhetoric that “is appropriate for public deliberation. Nussbaum achieves this by designating King’s sermon as a form of ‘civic poetry’” (97). This interpretation has the effect of deracinating King from the prophetic biblical tradition of the Black churches in which he spent his entire life. Flores’s response is a Latinx theological aesthetics that does not sunder the project of political liberation behind the comforting, cathartic veneer of the beautiful. She opts in particular for the aesthetics of Alejandro García-Rivera, who argued that “aesthetics can unite parties across difference without undermining the richness of their particularity” (99). García-Rivera’s idea of aesthetic solidarity lifts up Josiah Royce’s notion of the “obverse collection” of marginal background elements in an otherwise synthetic whole. “Like the cluster of interconnected points that forms the [obverse collection], lifting up one point allows it to be foregrounded without breaking the relationship between all of the points . . . to lift up other points from the background. Building on García-Rivera’s insight, I argue that lifting up the lowly is a crucial principle for an aesthetics of the common good . . . that supplants a projects of ‘oneness’ with ‘wholeness,’ and allows distinctive identities to be stitched together to cultivate solidarity” (106). She expands her accounting of this theme of relational solidarity in light of important figures in Latinx theology (Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Michelle González Maldonado, Néstor Medina, and Ada María Isasi-Díaz). Each of them points in different ways to the problems incumbent on Latinx identity formations that privilege certain constituencies and marginalize others (Black and Indigenous Latinxs). Flores argues that theological aesthetics holds a key to bridging the discursive, racial, and ideological barriers preventing the integration of a pan-Latinx political solidarity. Flores’s capstone chapter reviews Catholic theological reflection on “the aesthetic dimensions of solidarity.” Flores considers David Hollenbach’s idea of intellectual solidarity as a commitment to engage honestly with difference, whether in conversation or in the more rigorous confrontation of intellectual argumentation. Yet, what Hollenbach wrote in the early 2000s needs to be rethought today, Flores writes, because “civility has fallen on hard times among many participants in the life of democracy” (126). Hollenbach’s scheme of intellectual solidarity seems to omit the possibility that argumentation could veer off into mendacity and power politics, destroying democratic solidarity. Reviewing the deadly battles that took place on the weekend of August 11–12, 2017, when white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, VA, in their infamous “Unite the Right” rally, Flores concludes that “Hollenbach’s conception of intellectual solidarity mirrors the insufficiency of liberal calls for civility and toleration in the face of injustice” (128). She proposes in its place Michael Jaycox’s idea of conflictual solidarity, in which righteous anger, and practices that confront contradictions among conjoined social movements, present a more constructive notion of solidarity. Flores develops the theme with the notion of practical solidarity, grounded in perspectives from Lisa Sowle Cahill, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Julie Hanlon Rubio, and Meghan Clark. She calls for a conscientized everyday praxis along the lines of Isasi-Díaz’s conscientized cotidiano. Beyond mere intellectual solidarity, activists would be on their guard to “show up” at the frontlines of historical irruptions like Charlottesville 2017, to fight white supremacism, promote the health-care rights of women and mothers, or to work for international human rights. Flores also criticizes a different, decidedly regressive, form of solidarity—consumptive solidarity—focusing our attention on communities formed around commodity relations, capitalist affluence, and the nefarious psychic effects of social media. “Consumptive solidarity, akin to what Vincent Miller calls virtual solidarity, substitutes the ingestion of images, so to speak, for the kind of engagement that forms among communities of solidarity characterized by mutuality, equality and participation” (137). Consumptive solidarity is, in effect, a form of anti-solidarity. Flores’s proposal for aesthetic solidarity is a threefold edifice. First, it considers aesthetics as a source and medium of community formation, especially around “signs that promote justice or injustice.” Second, she predicates the aesthetic possibility on an a priori community “characterized by relationships of mutuality, equality, and participation that fosters human dignity.” Finally, such a community would be grounded in projects that “seek a fostering of justice as the minimal level of solidarity required for human flourishing and the common good” (141–42). The book closes with some “flor y canto” of Flores’s own aesthetic, a canticle in which her foremothers and sisters merge spiritually and aesthetically with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Overall, this text is an important addition for readers interested in Latinx theology and religion and finer debates about aesthetics in the liberal justice ethics frame. The writing is clear, literate, and elegant. Flores’s theo-ethics is grounded in ethnographic insight, making regular references to historical communities—real people with living voices. In a book seeking to challenge liberal traditions in ethics, especially where they squelch the voices of ethno-racial minorities, this is indispensable. Finally, Flores’s interdisciplinary ventures are underwritten by a broad use of sources, mostly in dialogue, across the fields of Catholic and Latinx theological studies. She takes seriously the many critiques of theological aesthetics that have arisen in Latinx theology over the last twenty years. Her work represents one of the clearest so far to bridge the discursive divide in that field between commitments to beauty and justice. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
TI - The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy, By Nichole M. Flores
JF - Journal of the American Academy of Religion
DO - 10.1093/jaarel/lfac033
DA - 2022-06-06
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-aesthetics-of-solidarity-our-lady-of-guadalupe-and-american-2HML0znoBf
SP - 501
EP - 504
VL - 90
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -