The first full-length study to show the profound relation between aesthetic philosophy and modern racial thinking.Under Representationoffers a clear and readable account of difficult but highly significant philosophical concepts and shows their relationship to the basic ways in which we think about race.Challenges both the paucity of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies and the lack of attention to aesthetics in critical race theory. Under Representationshows how the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy ground the racial order of the modern world in our concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity. Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful "racial regime of representation" whose genealogy runs from Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late Modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is not just about depiction of diverse humans or inclusion in political or cultural institutions. It is an activity that undergirds the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social. Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: The racialized remain "under representation," on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. Both a genealogy and an account of our present,Under Representationultimately helps show how a political reading of aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical than multicultural demands for representation. Draws upon and significantly expands a highly influential and much cited article Lloyd wrote titled "Race Under Representation."There has recently been a significant renewal of interest in aesthetics in both philosophy and in literary and cultural criticism, but this is the only book that addresses head-on the role that aesthetics has played in shaping modern conceptions of race and of representation.