Aesthetics of Refusal in Contemporary Literary Worlds
DOI: https://doi.org/10.65840/jllcd.v1i3.52
aesthetic resistance, contemporary literature, Dalit aesthetics, ecocriticism, gendered memory, cultural agency, postcolonial literary studies
Abstract
This article develops a data-driven reading of aesthetic resistance in contemporary literary culture through a curated 37-record corpus of works and literary formations coded for theme, aesthetic principle, resistance form, cultural context, and inferred agency. Rather than treating aesthetics as beauty detached from politics, the study asks how form becomes a medium of refusal when literature confronts caste, patriarchy, ecological devastation, partition memory, spiritual egalitarianism, and cultural survival. The analysis combines documentary corpus auditing, qualitative content analysis, agency scoring, field-regime mapping, and close interpretive synthesis. Results show that ecological crisis and more-than-human vulnerability constitute the largest resistance field (15 records), followed by anti-caste and subaltern dignity (12), while Dalit/insurgent realism and eco-aesthetic/Anthropocene writing form the strongest aesthetic regimes. Agency is high but uneven: texts of Dalit refusal and classical ethical reorientation display strong explicit agency, whereas gendered trauma and partition memory often stage agency as constrained, delayed, or wounded. The article proposes an “aesthetics of refusal” model in which literary value emerges through insurgent truth, ecological grief, gendered memory, and sacred-cultural reorientation.
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