Flores exposes the limitations of political liberalism’s aesthetic responses to religious difference, turning instead to Latine theological aesthetics and Catholic social thought to build a framework for interpreting religious symbols in our contemporary pluralistic and participatory democratic life. The Aesthetics of Solidarity argues for the capacity of Our Lady of Guadalupe-and similar religious symbols-to make democratic claims. Yet, from the outside, Guadalupe’s symbol is illegible within a liberal political framework that seeks to protect society’s basic structures from religious encroachment by relegating religious speech, practices, and symbols to the background. In diverse ways, these groups have used Guadalupe’s symbol and narrative to critique society’s basic structures-including law, policy, and institutions-while seeking to inspire broader participation and representation among marginalized peoples in US democracy. Latine Catholics have used Our Lady of Guadalupe as a symbol in democratic campaigns ranging from the Chicano movement and United Farm Workers’ movements to contemporary calls for just immigration reform. How aesthetic religious experiences can create solidarity in marginalized communities ![]() Scholars of architecture, political theory, and religion, as well as cultural and critical studies will also be informed by its arguments. This balanced and unique study will appeal to anyone interested in Israel or Zionism, the Palestinians, the Middle East conflict, Jerusalem, or its monuments. Analyzing controversies over the authenticity of holy sites, the restorations of the Dome of the Rock, and the discourse of accusation following the Buraq, or Wailing Wall, riots of 1929, Monk discloses for the first time that, as combatants looked to architecture and invoked the transparency of their own historical situation, they simultaneously advanced-and normalized-the conflict’s inability to account for itself. ![]() ![]() Succumbing neither to the view that monuments are autonomous figures onto which political meaning has been projected, nor to the obverse claim that in Jerusalem shrines are immediate manifestations of the political, Monk traces the reciprocal history of both these positions as well as describes how opponents in the conflict debated and theorized their own participation in its self-representation. While examining the relation between monuments and mass violence in this context, he documents Palestinian, Zionist, and British attempts to advance competing arguments concerning architecture’s utility to politics. Monk combines groundbreaking archival research with theoretical insights to examine in particular the Mandate era-the period in the first half of the twentieth century when Britain held sovereignty over Palestine. In An Aesthetic Occupation Daniel Bertrand Monk unearths the history of the unquestioned political immediacy of “sacred” architecture in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
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