CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Creating and nurturing beauty in dark times helps us endure another day. Beauty can help us appraise how we live and how we can build better lives. Its presence or absence is a critique of the social and political structures that are necessary to allow it to flourish, said Mimi Thi Nguyen, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of gender and women’s studies.
Nguyen wrote about the concept of beauty in times of crisis and catastrophe in her new book, “The Promise of Beauty.”
The book doesn’t define what is beautiful. Beauty could be art, nature, a child’s face or the sound of a coffeemaker in the morning. It can be attached to ideas of freedom or security. Nguyen said she’s interested in what calling something beautiful says about the life we should be living.
She said she became interested in the subject after reading accounts of refugees displaced by war encountering some form of beauty and how it interrupted the catastrophe, even if for just a moment, and gave them a feeling of life being furthered.
“I saw it across common everyday occurrences of grief and in the middle of war. I wanted to understand the structure of the concept of beauty and what it is doing across all these very different situations,” Nguyen said.
She said beauty is invoked as the thing that makes life worth living and affirms one’s connection to the world. For example, hairdressers giving free haircuts to homeless people in Los Angeles provides a feeling of care.
Examining beauty also lends itself to political observations, Nguyen said.
“Beauty is often invoked as a way to solicit the company of others who will find the same things beautiful as you do. We create communities around the things we find beautiful. We invoke it for all kinds of reasons — to save a coral reef or to build a border wall,” she said. “Every kind of invocation of the promise of beauty is a political one, whether explicit or implicit. It tells us something about the conditions under which the promise of beauty can be fulfilled.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms encouraged posting a beautiful piece of art or a song. People shared videos of singing with their neighbors from apartment balconies or making noise to thank healthcare workers. Some adopted intense skin care regimens as a way of self-care during a dark political time, Nguyen said.
In wartime, invocations of beauty serve different purposes and say different things about what we value, whether it’s admiring the sleek lines of a military aircraft or an image of refugees cultivating gardens amid rubble or caring for a stray cat, she said.
Ideas of beauty also can cause harm, through racist beauty standards that are Eurocentric or the idea that people from other cultures need to be educated on appreciating beauty or dressing themselves “properly,” Nguyen said.
Beauty can hide the ugliness of violence or an exploitive industry, she said.
“So many of the flowers we buy in supermarkets are cultivated by very low-paid workers in other countries who are processing thousands and thousands of flowers, inhaling pesticides and are not paid a living wage. But we don’t see that part. We see only the beautiful flowers,” Nguyen said.
In the book’s introduction, she wrote that Stanford University’s response to a highly publicized rape on campus was to establish a contemplation garden at the scene of the crime.
The book’s chapters are organized according to the ways in which the promise of beauty might be fulfilled. Nguyen wrote about the desire to copy beautiful things through a drawing or photograph so we can hold onto them. The image of a young woman in a beautiful dress is common in the Vietnamese diaspora, “invoking the promise that we will carry on despite being displaced and we can hold on to our heritage even in a new place,” she said.
The promise of beauty might be fulfilled through education, such as the establishment of a beauty school in Kabul after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which Nguyen saw as a parallel for an imposed education in democracy; or through humanitarianism, illustrated by the short-lived Miss Landmine Pageant that aimed to bring awareness of unexploded landmines in places such as Angola and Cambodia, and the relationship of beauty to universal rights and freedoms.
Nguyen examined “ruin porn” — photographs of Detroit in industrial ruin, with images of empty buildings filled with junk — and the accusation that the photographs failed to represent the underlying causes of the destruction. She questioned what an appropriate way to look at violence or devastation might be.
Finally, she looked at resilience as a strategy for living through crisis, such as cancer or an earthquake or the death of a loved one, and how it is often described as beautiful.
“It’s such a satisfying story to tell about yourself, and it’s the premise of a million pop songs,” but it can cover up the devastation and the obstacles to living well, Nguyen said.
“What about people who are not grateful to grow from the experience of a crisis and whose survival is not understood to be beautiful because it expresses itself as anger or bitterness? There are some ways of survival that don’t get celebrated in the way that someone does who says, ‘I learned so much from my journey,’” she said.
Nguyen said she was surprised at the ubiquitousness of the promise of beauty in pop songs, memes, novels, poems, works of art and the speech of politicians.
“People take beauty very seriously as a way to think about how to live,” she said.