Journal Articles by Joshua M Hall
Contemporary Aesthetics, 2026
In this essay, I explore two interconnected figures of aesthetics and poverty. The first figure i... more In this essay, I explore two interconnected figures of aesthetics and poverty. The first figure is aesthetics poverty, meaning the (a) literal (relative) poverty of the majority precariously-employed scholars in what has been called the “ghettoization of aesthetics” within academic philosophy, and (b) figurative poverty of the discipline in terms of its tendency to focus narrowly on pleasurable and individual phenomena to the neglect of disturbing and community phenomena. The second figure is poverty aesthetics, meaning (a) aesthetic values and practices associated with the absolute poverty of aesthetic practitioners, such as the “artisanal miners” of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), (b) the tendency to suppress, make-invisible, or “anesthetize” those aesthetics (in the sense of the negation of aesthesis qua “sense-perception”). The connection between these two figures is not only that enslaved and child labor in the DRC is necessary to power the devices on which scholars do their aesthetics research, but also that attempting to counter this anesthesia risks “professional suicide” (as in the numerous censorings and firings of U.S. scholarly critics of Israel's genocide of Palestine). Rolling those dice once more, I dig deep into Siddartha Kara’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, unearthing the unifying figure of this investigation: “aesthetics of disturbance,” defined as a muddied offloading of the global northerners’ psychological turmoil onto global southerners, the cost of which includes the latter’s individual misery and political chaos. Thus, aesthetic scholars are ethically-politically obligated to help re-aestheticize the artisanal miners of the DRC, thereby proving ourselves worthy of the financial compensation to keep such research going.
International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2026
This article reinterprets Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) as a hybrid artform which, though c... more This article reinterprets Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) as a hybrid artform which, though complicit in the racist fascism of its source materials, nevertheless constitutes a vital antifascist counterforce, especially in the more recent wave I call "neo-JRPGs." At its core is the figure of the "wizard," derived from a Middle English word for "wise," and used interchangeably with "philosopher" through the Middle Ages. In short, JPRG players can empower themselves and others to resist the racist fascism of mainstream society, like the police officer "wizards" of the KKK, by role-playing as medieval philosophy-inspired, Tolkien-inflected wizards. To flesh this out, I offer the case study of one of the greatest JRPGs, Phantasy Star IV, whose literal wizard character acts analogously to the Aristotelian "Active Intellect," channeling ideas from game designer "wizard" Rieko Kodama (a female pioneer in that role) to actualize the potential intellect of the other playable characters, and thereby the player themself, into a gaming wizardry that can empower a second actualization into progressive philosophy.
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 2026
Though Aníbal Quijano’s thought has been enormously influential in the Global North via the incor... more Though Aníbal Quijano’s thought has been enormously influential in the Global North via the incorporation of key concepts by theorists such as Walter Mignolo and María Lugones, it was only last year (2024) that a full-length book manuscript by this most influential Peruvian theorist of his generation was finally translated into English. From that recent anthology, Foundational Essays: On the Coloniality of Power, the present investigation shows how the last three chapters of the recently translated anthology give us a new way to read Quijano, thereby generating an argument for decolonial revolution today. The present investigation’s three sections each rehearse a different premise of Quijano’s argument there, as follows: (1) Latin America (most obviously Peru), is the heart of colonial modernity; (2) utopian rebellious aesthetics is the heart of Latin American colonial modernity; and (3) Indigeneity is the heart of the utopian rebellious aesthetics of Latin American colonial modernity. And the concluding section identifies a beginning of this revolutionary aesthetics in Quijano’s casual reference to the Peruvian vernacular dance chicha, which with other Indigenous-infused dances like salsa is cutting through the “Arguedian knot” of colonialized identity.
Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2027
This article expands Cavell’s interpretation of The Philadelphia Story (1940) in relation to Shak... more This article expands Cavell’s interpretation of The Philadelphia Story (1940) in relation to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596) and gendered democratic flourishing. My first section rehearses Geraldine Heng’s argument in Empire of Magic (2004) that the medieval romance genre channels Crusades trauma into imagined British nationhood, as embodied by Merlin. My second section finds a second wave of romantic overflow in Shakespeare’s play via the fairy king Oberon. My third section identifies Cary Grant's “C. K. Dexter Haven” as the film’s Merlin/Oberon. The Dionysian current of this Merlin-Oberlin-Grant flow I call “magical weakness,” a strategic male self-weakening for gendered democratic flourishing.
Culture and Dialogue, 2025
The Belgian philosopher of science and trained chemist Isabelle Stengers is famous for her creati... more The Belgian philosopher of science and trained chemist Isabelle Stengers is famous for her creative conception of “cosmopolitics,” an ontological pluralism and a practicing scientist’s pragmatic compromise between reductivist orthodoxy and postmodern(ish) solipsism. In Stengers’ cosmopolitics, each science’s reality-claims are limited by its history, disciplinary guardrails, and laboratory or field constraints on the production of new “factishes” (Bruno Latour’s term for entities, such as neutrinos, discovered in history but retroactively timeless). One implication of Stenger’s cosmopolitics for the human sciences (exemplified by anthropology) is that every encounter between a researcher and a subject is, and should be approached as, a kind of dance. In Stengers’ recent Making Sense in Common, she repeatedly describes the staging of such scientific dances as “ontological choreography,” seeking a coalition of progressive members of the “commons”: a cosmopolitical dance of all beings.
Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 2025
In recent decades, global social movements have increasingly coalesced around the pursuit of reco... more In recent decades, global social movements have increasingly coalesced around the pursuit of recognition. This article scrutinizes an enduring and far-reaching popular movement in Iran sparked by the tragic death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, which stands as a poignant embodiment of the collective quest for recognition across multiple dimensions. This article systematically addresses three pivotal inquiries. First, it meticulously traces the historical trajectory of issues involving the hijab within contemporary Iran, unearthing its origins as far back as the 1930s. Second, it employs Axel Honneth's multifaceted theory of misrecognition to unveil the intricate layers of misrecognition closely linked with the hijab in Iran. This encompasses the coercive regulation of women's bodies, legal disparities, and societal pressures culminating in diminished self-esteem and the inflation of male self-confidence. Third, this article emphatically underscores the integral significance of recognition, redistribution, and representation, particularly in the context of marginalized groups within Iranian society. While originating as a protest against a mandatory wearing of the hijab, the "Woman, Life, Freedom " movement transcends the confines of this singular issue to include more extensive struggles encompassing women's rights, resistance to religious oppression, and the assertion of individual freedoms. This comprehensive and rigorously analyzed investigation furnishes nuanced insights into the intricate socio-political landscape of contemporary Iran, underscored by the irrefutable significance of recognition as a transformative and indispensable facet of the broader pursuit of social justice.
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2025
This article, composed six months after the Oct. 7th Hamas operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” in the shad... more This article, composed six months after the Oct. 7th Hamas operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” in the shadow of Israel’s retaliatory genocide, was catalyzed by a viral social media video with alternating clips of Palestinian and Native American people dancing in defiant resistance to ongoing white settler colonial ethnic cleansing and genocide, in loving embrace of their own Indigenous ways of being. After an introductory setting of the stage for this video, the first section rehearses the two historical chapters of dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Always Danced, emphasizing the paradoxical late nineteenth-century campaigns (1) criminalizing Indigenous American dances, and (2) appropriating these dances and dancers for non-Indigenous audiences. The second section then pivots to Australian choreographer Nicholas Rowe’s Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, emphasizing the appropriation of a traditional shepherd dance (Dabke) into the Zionist project of fabricating an orientalist tradition to justify their colonization. Finally, the concluding section spotlights Palestine’s Birzeit University and the El-Funoun folkdance troupe as exemplars, captured in the Palestinian hip hop song’s neologism “Palest-Indians,” of loving Indigenous death-defying dance resistance.
Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory, and Sociocultural Hermeneutics, 2025
Despite Spinoza's prominence in Joyce's Ulysses, almost nothing in the Joyce Industry's hundred y... more Despite Spinoza's prominence in Joyce's Ulysses, almost nothing in the Joyce Industry's hundred years has been written about him. My first section reviews three exceptions to this trend, which view the character Leopold Bloom as modeled on Spinoza's (1) life, (2) redefinition of prophecy, and (3) the "attribute" of thought thinking thought. My second section follows a fourth Joycean to the Marxist Antonio Negri's essay on Spinozist freedom and Joyce, from which I derive a fourth figure of Bloom as (4) a liberating prosthesis for infinite democracy. And my final section applies my previous interpretation of Spinoza's "intuition" as poetry to Ulysses, interpreted as an epic prose poem where Joyce as a Spinozist God poly-conjugationally persecutes a poly-subjugated Bloom, including with pervasive antisemitism, thus making Ulysses more satirical Inferno than happy Divine Comedy. However, strategically channeling Spinoza and his philosophy more powerfully into Bloom renders him an ethically-politically Stoic hero, defiantly prophesizing a democratization of Joycean conjugation, from persecuting polysubjugated Others to joyful self-conjugating in search of radical democracy and just peace.
Culture and Dialogue, 2025
As I have explored elsewhere, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild, which my former students and I re-... more As I have explored elsewhere, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild, which my former students and I re-founded in 2012, is a team of community members who engage in theoretical discussion, support group self-cultivation, and community activism. To further promote the guild as a catalyst for progressive social change, the present article connects it to both the popular cultural phenomenon of the “X-Men”—to make the guild more appealing to students and laypeople—and to the cutting-edge contemporary French philosophy of Étienne Balibar—to make the guild more appealing to professors and culture workers. Moreover, the article connects these low- and high-brow phenomena to each other as well, thereby illustrating the political relevance of the lower, as well as a weakness in the higher, pursuant to social justice activism today.
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 2024
Though Mathias Risse and Gabriel Wollner's On Trade Justice admirably incorporates the history of... more Though Mathias Risse and Gabriel Wollner's On Trade Justice admirably incorporates the history of European philosophy and U.S. government, their otherwise reasonable proposals rest on dubious grounds. The book derives both much of its appeal, and its primary vulnerability, from a cluster of central terms that are situated precariously at the intersection of metaphors and concepts, or what Lakoff and Johnson call "metaphorical concepts." In this article, I explore the three most important such terms, as featured in the following paraphrase of theirs: "Trade is an embedded ground of justice." For each italicized term, I conclude, Risse and Wollner vacillate between its most conceptual and metaphorical meanings, thereby attempting to (a) stretch "trade" to identify prehistoric exchange with global capitalism, so as to (b) rebrand the contextual "ground" of this universal activity as a foundation, even though (c) foundations "embedded" in other foundations simply reduce to their lowest common denominator. The latter, in this case, is global capitalism, the most immoral practices of which they are thereby pressured to defend, including temporary forms of the very exploitation that they so persuasively reconceive and otherwise condemn.
Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2025
In this article, I apply Australian logician and ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood's Feminism ... more In this article, I apply Australian logician and ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood's Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, specifically its alternative logic of "the dance of interaction," to a controversial community-engagement program in my home state of Alabama. At Rural Studio, Auburn University students design free housing and public works for one of the poorest regions in the United States, known as the "Black Belt." Through the lens of Plumwood's ecofeminist dancing logic, the marginalized source of Rural Studio's survival is revealed to be the resilience of the disempowered majority-Black community. Inspired thereby, I sketch an ecofeminist choreography with three "dancing" concepts (namely Plumwood's "the master model," Vandana Shiva's "nature's logic," and Ariel Salleh's "holding"), acknowledging the resilience of the disempowered as a necessary step toward an ethically-sustainable aesthetics.
Tábano, 2024
Building on my previous exploration of the role of dance in the contemporary French political phi... more Building on my previous exploration of the role of dance in the contemporary French political philosopher Jacques Rancière's Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, first published in French in 2011, the present essay turns to another book originally published in the same year, The Intervals of Cinema. Having previously established that the core of Rancière's philosophical method is an analysis of philosophical homonyms into figurative dancing conceptual partners, I begin by applying that method to the first chapter of Intervals, "Cinematic Vertigo: Hitchcock to Vertov and Back." There I identify two series of such dancing partners, as follows: Hitchcock's image-controlling, capitalist vertiginous fall, and Vertov's movementequalizing, communist balanced dance. I then critique the implicit marginalizing of women and female bodies in the films and chapter, including Hitchcock's protagonist's best friend and exfiancé, and Vertov's cosmetologists and switchboard operators. Finally, I offer a corrective from the proto-feminist life of my grandmother, a onetime cosmetologist, switchboard operator, and Glamour Shots amateur model, my grandmother, Louise Nunnelley, or "Mamaw." Such are the unacknowledged material basis of Rancière's radical democratic philosophy, the specificallyembodied and positioned female dancers who continue to get lost in his figurative dance. 
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Journal Articles by Joshua M Hall