Modes of address are forms of signification that we direct at living
beings, things, and places, and they at us and at each other. Seeing is
a form of address. So are speaking, singing, and painting. Initiating or
responding to such calls, we participate in encounters with the world.
Widely used yet less often examined in its own right, the notion of
address cries out for analysis.
Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of
address and puts it to work in the arts, critical theory, and social
life. She shows how address props up finely hewn modalities of
relationality, agency, and normativity. Address exceeds a one-on-one
pairing of cultural productions with their audiences. As ardently
energizing tiny slippages and snippets as fueling larger impulses in the
society, it activates and reaestheticizes registers of race, gender,
class, coloniality, and cosmopolitanism. In readings of writers and
artists ranging from Julio Cortázar to Jamaica Kincaid and from Martha
Rosler to Pope.L, Roelofs demonstrates the centrality of address to
freedom and a critical political aesthetics. Under the banner of a
unified concept of address, Hume, Kant, and Foucault strike up
conversations with Benjamin, Barthes, Althusser, Fanon, Anzaldúa, and
Butler. Drawing on a wide array of artistic and theoretical sources and
challenging disciplinary boundaries, the book illuminates address's
significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic
engagement in it. Keeping the reader on the lookout for flash fiction
that pops up out of nowhere and for insurgent whisperings that take to
the air, Arts of Address explores the aliveness of being alive.
