“Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Promise of Beauty analyzes so much more than the pleasures that beauty seems to promise. Rather, this exquisite and textured analysis of beauty’s conceptual past urges a turn to beauty as a method to interrogate the limits, conditions, and potential of the present, detaching beauty from its ideological debts to humanism and urging a reattachment not only to what Nguyen calls ‘the times between revolutions’ but also, in the everyday practice of knowing and making beauty, to the need to believe that revolution will come again.”
-- Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century