Can our values be objective? On ethics, aesthetics, and progressive politics / Satya P. Mohanty -- The pragmatics of the aesthetic / Giles Gunn -- Aesthetics and cultural studies / Winfried Fluck -- The resistance to cultural studies / John Carlos Rowe -- Desegregating American literary studies / Shelley Fisher Fishkin -- Difference and disciplinarity / Robyn Wiegman -- Doing justice to C.L.R. James's Mariners, renegades and castaways / Donald E. Pease -- Mumbo jumbo, theory, and the aesthetics of wholeness / Johnnella E. Butler -- Aesthetics again? The pleasures and the dangers / Paul Lauter -- "Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure": beauty discourse and the logic of aesthetics / Amelia Jones -- The aesthetics of wounding: trauma, self-representation, and the critical voice / Kathleen McHugh -- Beautiful identities: when history turns state's evidence / Chon A. Noriega -- Toward a pluralist aesthetics / Heinz Ickstadt