In Beyond the Sovereign Self Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. Among others, Kester analyzes the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper, experimental practices associated with the escrache tradition in Argentina, and indigenous Canadian artists such as Nadia Myre and Michèle Taïna Audette, showing how socially engaged art catalyzes forms of resistance that operate beyond the institutional art world. From the Americas and Europe to Iran and South Africa, Kester presents a historical genealogy of recent engaged art practices rooted in a deep history of cultural production, beginning with nineteenth-century political struggles and continuing into contemporary anticolonial resistance and other social movements.

"“In a superlative demonstration of a hypothesis in action, Grant H. Kester’s definitive study Beyond the Sovereign Self effectively melts down, then reimagines our stagnated concepts of aesthetic autonomy and avant-gardism in a dauntless bid to retheorize the increasingly entangled, if not indistinguishable, realms of twenty-first-century social activism and art.”" - The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art

"“With characteristic thoroughness, Grant H. Kester articulates the radical potential in challenging the cherished notion of art’s autonomy. Centering dialogic and activist art practices, he insightfully argues that the social labor of cultural resistance necessarily operates in generative forms of collectivity and dissensus.”" - Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology