"Communities of Sense" argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today's globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Ranciere's theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the "science of the sensible," is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation through which political orders emerge.

The first of the collection's three sections explicitly examines the links between aesthetics and social and political experience. Here a new essay by Ranciere posits art as a key site where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. In the second section, contributors investigate how sense was constructed in the past by the European avant-garde and how it is mobilized in today's global visual and political culture. Exploring the viability of various models of artistic and political critique in the context of globalization, the authors of the essays in the volume's final section suggest a shift from identity politics and preconstituted collectivities toward processes of identification and disidentification. Topics discussed in the volume vary from digital architecture to a makeshift museum in a Paris suburb, and from romantic art theory in the wake of Hegel to the history of the group-subject in political art and performance since 1968. An interview with etienne Balibar rounds out the collection.

"Contributors." Emily Apter, etienne Balibar, Carlos Basualdo, T. J. Demos, Rachel Haidu, Beth Hinderliter, David Joselit, William Kaizen, Ranjanna Khanna, Reinaldo Laddaga, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, Reinhold Martin, Seth McCormick, Yates McKee, Alexander Potts, Jacques Ranciere, Toni Ross

Antagonizing White Feminism: Intersectionality's Critique of Women's Studies and the Academy pushes back against the exclusive scholarship and discourse coming out of women-centered spaces and projects, which throw up barriers by narrowly defining who can participate. Vehement resistance to using inclusive language and renaming scholarly spaces like Women's Studies and Critical Feminism expresses itself in concerns that women are still oppressed and thus women-only spaces must be maintained. But who is a woman? What are the characteristics of a woman's lived experience? Do affinity and a history of oppression justify exclusion? This book shows how intersectional feminism is often underperformed and appropriated as a "woke" vocabulary by elite women who are unwilling to do the necessary emotional work around their privilege. As Trans Women, Femmes, Women of Color, Queer Women, Gender Variant, and Gender Non-Conforming scholars emerge, the heteronormative, cisgender, colonial idea of women and the feminine is rapidly under attack. The contributors believe that to engage in the necessary conversations about the oppressed performing oppression is to disrupt the exclusionary basis of monolithic understandings of the feminine. Only then can we advance the coalition needed to forge a multiracial, multicultural, queer-led, anti-imperialist feminism.