New from the University of Chicago Press: Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display by Sally M. Promey.
About the book, from the publisher:
A revelatory critique of public display in the United States.Sally M. Promey is professor of American studies and religious studies as well as the Caroline Washburn Professor of Religion and Visual Culture at Yale University, where she directs the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion. She is author or editor of several books, most recently Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice.
In Religion in Plain View, Sally M. Promey analyzes religion’s visible saturation of American public space and the histories that shaped this exhibitionary aesthetics. In street art, vehicle décor, signs, monuments, architecture, zoning policy, and more, Promey exposes American display’s merger of evangelicalism, capitalism, and imperialism. From this convergence, display materializes a distinctly American drive to advertise, claim territory, invalidate competitors, and fabricate a tractable national heritage. Charting this aesthetics’ strategic work as a Protestant technology of White nation formation, Religion in Plain View offers a dynamic critique of the ways public display perpetuates deeply ingrained assumptions about the proper shape of life and land in the United States.
--Marshal Zeringue
