ABSTRACT
The introduction to The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History provides an overview of the major concerns that inform this edited collection as well as a critical genealogy of key authors whose thinking on colonialism, the postcolonial, coloniality, decolonization, and more have shaped the volume’s conceptualization. The authors begin by contextualizing the project in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic as it unfolded from 2020 to 2022. They argue that the major events that defined this unprecedented moment, including devastating racial violence, a public reckoning for museums and monuments, ongoing environmental catastrophe, and the spread of ethnonationalisms, among others, resulted from colonial structures that have been integral to the formation of the modern world. Noting that the pandemic revealed power mechanisms and systemic injustices that tend to operate covertly, the introduction and the volume ask what is the role of art history—whose existence is imbricated in European colonialism—to evaluating these inherited systems and institutions, coming to terms with the discipline’s complicity in perpetuating them, and forging ahead towards ethically grounded and social justice-driven futures. The authors then turn to explicate the volume’s themed sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving.
