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"--
In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These &;ugly freedoms&; legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker&;s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism&;s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.
Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, identifying modes of &;ugly freedom&; that can lead to domination or provide a source of emancipatory potential.