Can art history be made global?: meditations from the periphery

Abstract

"This book responds to the challenge of the 'global turn' in the humanities from the perspective of art history. While cautioning against the conceptual traps of a facile globalism, it builds on a theory of transculturation to form the keystone of a critical globality, which would enable art history to transcend different shades of parochialism - Eurocentrism, methodological nationalism, or insulated area studies. Such a perspective carries a radical critique of explanatory paradigms and disciplinary frameworks premised on a bounded understanding of culture. By shifting the focus of enquiry to South Asia, a location designated in mainstream scholarship as peripheral, the book seeks a way for the discipline to translate intellectual resources and insights from segregated domains into globally intelligible analyses. The move to supplement macro-perspectives by descending into the thicket of individual sites asks that we negotiate multiple scales beyond the global - nation, region, locality - and conjoin these to individual subject positions. Does the investigation of art history from a perspective not aligned along the Euro-American axis, though shaped through interaction with globally travelling concepts, challenge us to rethink some of the premises of the discipline so as to grow beyond both claims of universality and radical cultural relativism, and instead privilege an approach that historicises difference and locates it in a field of competing forces? The author aims not to offer another metanarrative, but to focus on a selection of themes from a particular region that together contribute to revitalizing the global with a criticality whose shape is contingent as much on its situatedness as its transcultural dynamics."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Introduction. Can art history be made global? -- Chapter one. The world in a grain of sand : a genealogy of world art studies -- Chapter two. Making and seeing images : tracking the routes of vision in early modern Eurasia -- Chapter three. Traversing scale(s) : transcultural modernism with and beyond the nation -- Chapter four. Beyond backwater arcadias : globalised locality and contemporary art practice -- Chapter five. When art embraces the planet : the contemporary exhibition form and the challenge of connected histories -- Postcript. The hunter and the squirrel : art history from the global to the planetary.