Towards a Postcolonial Aesthetics

This article approaches the idea of a postcolonial aesthetics from the point of view of the transformative exchange that occurs in the "contact zone" of the transcultural text. Debates about aesthetics revolve around its status as either an ideology or a stimulus, universal or culturally specific, elitist or quotidian. However, postcolonial texts - visual, auditory and written - produce an aesthetic engagement in which both producer and consumer are transformed, one that may force us to revise our understanding of the utility of aesthetics for postcolonial cultural production. The article contends that a non-cognitive quality referred to here as "material resonance" opens the way for a transformation of the field of aesthetics by postcolonial notions of cross-cultural engagement.