1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History
This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners.
Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions - the museum, the art market - are not only products of colonial legacies but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice - racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. The volume unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture and the discourse that contains them. It equally addresses the manifold complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity. This companion is organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
SECTION I
Introduction
Introduction
Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black
SECTION II
Being and Doing
1. Writing Art History in the Age of Black Lives Matter
Eddie Chambers
2. Being an Indigenous Art Historian in the Twenty-First Century: How Can Māori Adornment Reveal New Ways of Thinking about Art, Its Histories, and Futures
Ngarino Ellis
3. Reinvention at the Wheel: Shaping New Histories in the Decolonization of Disability
Amanda Cachia
4. The Power of Absence: An Interview with Ken Gonzales-Day
Tatiana Flores
5. Art in Paradise Found and Lost
LeGrace Benson
6. The Maquette-Modèles of Bodys Isek Kingelez: Creole Visions of Decolonial Monuments
Sandrine Colard
7. Decolonizing La Revolución: Cuban Artistic Practice in a Liminal Space
María de Lourdes Mariño Fernández
8. Museums Are Temples of Whiteness
Sumaya Kassim
9. Stepping Out of the Shadow of Imperial Monochrony: A Place-Centric Approach to Decolonizing Japanese Art History
Akiko Walley
10. On Failure and the Nation-State: A Decolonial Reading of Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America
Florencia San Martín
11. Light as a Feather: The Anti-Capitalist Radiance of Decolonial Art History
Wendy M. K. Shaw
SECTION III
Learning and Listening
12. Where’s Decolonization? The Ohketeau Cultural Center, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Arts Institutions
Rhonda Anderson and Larry Spotted Crow Mann, with Jonathan P. Eburne, Stacy Klein, and Carlos Uriona
13. Overcoming Art History’s Meta-Narrative
Deborah Hutton
14. Pathways to Art History: Pedagogy, Research, and Praxis through a Decolonial Lens
Ananda Cohen-Aponte
15. Pedagogies of Place: Listening and Learning in the Margins
Keg de Souza
16. The Unbearable Lightness of Adjuncting Art History
Claire Raymond
17. Decolonial Cinematic Flows: Histories, Movements, Confluences
Dalida María Benfield
18. Re-indigenizing Ancient Mexican Glyphic Codices
Felicia Rhapsody Lopez
19. (Not) Performing Pasifika Indigeneity: Destabilizing the Researcher as Decolonizing Method in Art History
Amelia Jones
20. Afterlives/Futurelives: Imagining Mermaids and Recalling Ghost Dancing
Roshini Kempadoo
21. Decolonizing California Mission Art and Architecture Studies
Yve Chavez
22. Radical Pedagogy: Environmental Performances and the Politics of Hope
Jane Chin Davidson
SECTION IV
Sensing and Seeing
23. Spooky Art History (or, Whatever Happened to the Postcolonial?)
Kajri Jain
24. Spatial Abstraction as a Colonizing Tool
Fernando Luiz Lara
25 Dishumanizing Art History?
Carolyn Dean
26. The Digital Voice as Postcolonial Proxy
Pamela N. Corey
27. Reflecting on Whiteness in Recent Contemporary Artwork Exploring Transnational Poland
Alpesh Kantilal Patel
28. Racialization, Creolization, and Minor Transnationalism: Black and Indigenous Exchange in Spanish Colonial Visual Culture
Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
29. The Imperial Landscape of Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Portraiture
Zirwat Chowdhury
30. Unseeing Art History: Inka Material Culture
Andrew James Hamilton
31. Debility and the Ethics of Proximity: Spatial and Temporal Immediacy in the Work of Candice Lin
Hentyle Yapp
32. Decolonizing Crocodiles, Repatriating Birds: Human-Animal Relations in the Indian Landscape
Tamara Sears
33. “We Are So Many Bodies, My Friends”: Countervisibility as Resurgent Tactics
Sarita Echavez See
SECTION V
Living and Loving
34. “She Carried with Her … A Large Bundle of Wearing Apparel Belonging to Herself”: Slave Dress as Resistance in Portraiture and Fugitive Slave Advertisements
Charmaine A. Nelson
35. Rina Banerjee’s Decolonial Ecologies
Rebecca M. Brown
36. The Teaching Is in the Making: A Relational and Embodied Experience of Anishinaabe Photographs
Celeste Pedri-Spade
37. Reflections on a Latinx Decolonial Praxis for Medievalists
Roland Betancourt
38. The Waters Surrounding Wallmapu, the Waters Surrounding Life
Seba Calfuqueo
39. Dialogical Episodes for Decolonizing (Art) History
Ana María Reyes
40. Inner Spaces: The Depth Imagination
Elizabeth DeLoughrey
41. Maria Auxiliadora da Silva: Nossa Mãe Maria of Terreiro Life and Faith on Black Grounds
Genevieve Hyacinthe
42. Michael Richards: Performance as Ritual and Black-Indigenous Haptic Visuality
Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa
43. Bittersweet Histories and Tarnished Gold: Slavery’s Sounds, Sights, and Silences in the Legacy of Dutch Brazil
Anuradha Gobin
44. A Personal Take, or Stuck in the Middle/Side and Going Nowhere: An Attempt at Imagining a Methodology for Engaging Colonial Photographic Archives, Histories, and Subjectivities
George Mahashe
SECTION VI
Afterword
45. Towards a Combative Decolonial Aesthetics
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Biography
Tatiana Flores is Jefferson Scholars Foundation Edgar F. Shannon Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia.
Florencia San Martín is an assistant professor of Art History in the Department of Art, Architecture and Design at Lehigh University.
Charlene Villaseñor Black is chair of the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.
