ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part Section I|46 pages
Introduction
part Section II|135 pages
Being and Doing
chapter 2|12 pages
Being an Indigenous Art Historian in the Twenty-First Century
chapter 3|11 pages
Reinvention at the Wheel
chapter 6|12 pages
The Maquette-Modèles of Bodys Isek Kingelez
chapter 9|12 pages
Stepping Out of the Shadow of Imperial Monochrony
chapter 10|13 pages
On Failure and the Nation-State
part Section III|130 pages
Learning and Listening
chapter 19|11 pages
(Not) Performing Pasifika Indigeneity
part Section IV|131 pages
Sensing and Seeing
chapter 28|11 pages
Racialization, Creolization, and Minor Transnationalism
chapter 31|10 pages
Debility and the Ethics of Proximity
chapter 32|13 pages
Decolonizing Crocodiles, Repatriating Birds
part Section V|136 pages
Living and Loving
chapter 34|12 pages
“She Carried with Her … A Large Bundle of Wearing Apparel Belonging to Herself”
chapter 36|12 pages
The Teaching Is in the Making
chapter 41|13 pages
Maria Auxiliadora da Silva
chapter 43|13 pages
Bittersweet Histories and Tarnished Gold
chapter 44|13 pages
A Personal Take, or Stuck in the Middle/Side and Going Nowhere
part Section VI|10 pages
Afterword