February 20, 2025
It gives me great pleasure to share that Salar Mameni's brilliant book, Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics, has received the Association for Asian American Studies 2025 award for outstanding contribution in Media, Performance, & Visual Studies!
As the AAAS Book Award Citation beautifully puts it:
Salar Mameni’s monograph is a triumph not only in theoretical intervention but in the aesthetics of academic writing. Terracene is as textured and full of sensory power as the art that it analyzes, bringing new critical meaning to “crude aesthetics” in both its analysis and enactment. Drawing together two important discourses on the global war on terror and the Anthropocene, Terracene offers an innovative approach to new materialist and posthumanist methodologies, one that in its “epistemic disobedience” illuminates our shared responsibilities to one another, to our myths, and to the planet. Mameni’s theoretical approach is vast, drawing from traditions as diverse as decolonial feminisms to Islamic cosmologies, yet coheres into a moving and clear readerly and sensual experience. It is also, needless to say, timely–arriving at a moment when scholarly works that address imperial violence in West Asia and the ongoing catastrophe of climate change are more imperative than ever.
Congratulations, Salar, on this wonderful achievement!