Ugly Freedoms

"Freedom is highest ideal in American political culture, but throughout American history it has legitimated brutal domination. In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth Anker argues for a full reckoning with modern freedom's complex legacy, which includes support for white supremacy, environmental destruction, colonialism, neoliberal exploitation, and misogyny. Anker also identifies a second, inverse form of ugly freedom found in disparaged practices and discarded spaces of the freedoms reflexively deemed ideal. Defying familiar boundaries of free expression, she locates emergent freedoms in uninspiring, compromised, and disturbing acts otherwise dismissed as demeaning, gross, or ineffectual. Anker analyzes the work of both types of ugly freedom in canonical and contemporary political theory, film, multimedia art, Caribbean sugar plantations, television serials, defunded urban bureaucracies, culinary confections, and even human guts to foreground overlooked practices of free action that cultivate more mutual, collaborative, and non-exploitative futures. Ugly Freedoms shifts the very study of freedom, both by contesting its idealized expressions and by radically expanding visions for what freedom can look like and who can exercise it"--