The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

“The Promise of Beauty”

A Public Lecture by Mimi Thi Nguyen
In this talk, I argue that beauty is a fruitful concept through which we engage narratives
of crisis. Such narratives name an ongoing condition or an irruptive event through which
the discrepancy between the world and what ought to be so often unfolds through citing
beauty –whether found in children, coral reefs, art, or rights— and what threatens its
continued presence. It is on these grounds that the meeting with beauty in a bad
situation lends itself to thoroughly political observation. Following and departing from
philosophical and aesthetic concepts of beauty as a horizon for life, I propose the
concept of the promise of beauty as a diagnosis of the conditions beauty requires to
flourish, with and against the threat of its disappearance or destruction; and as call to
action to transform those conditions to sustain such life that the beautiful promises to
us. That is, the promise of beauty can engender a critique of social arrangements and
political structures, and also call for the reorganization of arrangements and structures
in our promise to beauty – to replicate, preserve, or repair beauty, among other
fulfillments. Or as Toni Morrison put so well, “Beauty was not simply something to
behold, it was something one could do.”

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Gift of Freedom (Duke 2012) and The Promise of Beauty (Duke 2014). She is also co-editor of a special issue of positions: asia critique on Southeast Asian American Studies (20:3,Winter 2012); co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke 2007); and co-editor with Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette
Vicuna Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, and Yutian Wong of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke 2024). She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, The Funambulist, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum.

An Event in Celebration of the 40 th Anniversary of the Doctoral Program in Ethnic Studies.

Sponsored by:
Department of Ethnic Studies
Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program
Asian American Research Center
Mellon Foundation's Affirming Multivocal Humanities Initiative
This event is free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible.

For other accommodations or information, contact Vernadette Gonzalez at
vernadette@berkeley.edu