In The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man,” Kandice Chuh provides a fresh answer to an old question: What if losing the humanities as many have known them does not constitute a crisis? What if, after all, this so-called crisis affords an opportunity for the humanities to be remade? Chuh proposes remaking them in a manner “disidentified from liberalism” (122). This means embracing “subjugated or disavowed humanisms,” wherein “human beingness” is not bound up with “self-possessed individuality” but rather “constitutive relationality,” is less ruled by visual logics of dominance and conquest and more open to “mak[ing] sense through visceral multisensory experiences of the world” (xi). Such an expansive project demands that we recognize how the humanities of the past was simply a humanities, that we stand poised to espouse something bigger and better. Notably, Chuh's “we” is “not a category of identity” but is instead defined as “those committed to the minoritarian project of mobilizing knowledge to transform the social field by, in part, attending to the arrangement and practices of knowledge production” (124).

Chuh asks that we steady ourselves in the eye of the storm of whatever crisis the humanities might now be weathering to stop and consider exactly “what a defensible humanities might be and do” (2). For Chuh, such an effort begins with a reckoning. First, we must acknowledge how the “history of humanities and the disciplinary structures organizing their emergence is a piece with the history of the civilizational discourses subtending the legitimation of empire and capital” (1). That is, Chuh cannot abide preserving the humanities if they exist chiefly to inform and reinforce “liberal modernity's common sense” (1). All the while, cautious readers may begin to ask themselves what a comprehensive humanities program might look like if it were disarticulated from its liberal philosophical roots and current neoliberalist forms. Such broader institutional questions (and beyond) are raised by the book given Chuh's focus is on the literary and the aesthetic, and the literatures of the United States in particular.

But, thankfully, Chuh mounts a compelling case to take the teaching of literature by US or US-based authors not simply as a convenient (or worse, aberrant) case study for rethinking the humanities. Rather, for Chuh, literary studies serves as a point of departure from which to imagine all manner of “illiberal humanisms” manifest across disparate locales and disciplines (2). That is because first and foremost these “illiberal humanisms” are grounded in the relational and the multisensorial—the worldly and the visceral, the material and the contextual. Chuh justifies this move not simply with chapters that focus on the work of such authors as Langston Hughes and Leslie Marmon Silko but also with the force of repetition: “I want to emphasize,” Chuh writes, “that at stake in the enduring question, What is literature?, is the definition of the human” (53). Chuh insists that the “question of who can represent—who can stand for and as—the human percolates beneath the inquiry into literature's constitution and boundaries” (53). More broadly still, Chuh presses readers to envision an arrangement of knowledge where “contestations over the meaning of literature may . . . be understood as contestations over the meaning of the human and the world” (53).

By introducing readers to an “illiberal humanities” loosed from liberalism's unequitable bearings, Chuh means to establish new coordinates from which humanities thinking, teaching, and research ought to arise. For Chuh, “a materially grounded vision of the humanities” brought to the fore in works crafted by “those for whom the humanities have long been a site of contestation” makes possible two key interventions (122). First, we can confront honestly “the role of the bourgeois liberal humanism and its accompanying humanities in the (re)production of social inequality by their contribution to the naturalization of social hierarchies” (xi). As Chuh reiterates, we must “consider critically just what it is we are being enjoined to defend” when we defend the humanities: “the history of the humanities’ participation in the establishment and maintenance of . . . social hierarchies that distribute life chances differently along the intersecting axes of race, gender, class, sexuality and so on” (122). Second, what do we stand to gain if we follow Chuh's lead? We collectively “generate a materially grounded vision of the humanities” (122). This more worldly humanities “eschews the liberal values of civic virtue and progressive Enlightenment at the core of the liberal humanities and emphasizes instead study of the conditions and structures that give meaning to the human beyond the narrow, constrained confines of its bourgeois liberal definition” (122).

As the book's title suggests, aesthetic inquiry is key for Chuh, as it shapes what comes to pass for truth and arises out of one's “constitutive relationality” (xi). It “emphasizes the link between what is held to be reasonable and what is viscerally experienced” (26). Aesthetic inquiry also “elucidates the historic and ongoing uses of art . . . in the service of dominant regimes of power (i.e., liberal modernity) as well as by those subjugated by and within them” (26). Paramount to this book's larger project (“elaborat[ing] a mode of engaging the contemporary situation in the humanities without recourse to either defensiveness or resignation”) is how aesthetic inquiry operates as “a form of address defined by a deliberate openness to disidentification and defamiliarization” (123). Chuh urges readers to imagine what could be and what could be done.

Her portrait of the possible asks that we address the situated power and politics of aesthetics. In doing so we might become less invested in myths of the Enlightenment subject's discrete, possessive individuality while becoming more sensitive to an intimate, multisensorial, “radical aesthetics that undermines the privileged position of representation and its attendant processes of subjectification/subjection” (61). A more multiple “illiberal” humanities promises to deliver on an unquestioned article of faith to which many practitioners of humanities already cling, that we offer to our students and ourselves “alternative theorizations and models for ways of being and knowing,” feeling and acting, and more (xi).