ABSTRACT
Over the past twenty-five years, art^ historians have increasingly turned their attention to the situation of art and artists in countries subjected to western imperial rule. A new and distinct area of study, in addition, has developed concerned specifically with the analysis of all aspects of these societies and their cultures: the inter-disciplinary field of postcolonial studies. This embraces and interrelates traditional^ subjects such as history, geography, sociology, economics, political studies, literature, and the arts and crafts. The range of regions, societies, and peoples examined within postcolonial studies is vast (simply considering the history of western imperialism): the continents of Africa, southern and central America, Asia, and Australasia. Beyond all these peoples and societies and cultures, however,
postcolonial studies’ theoretical scope reaches much further, to include the history of, for instance, British colonialism in what are now the sovereign nation^-states of Canada and the United States of America – two more societies that will forever remain, in one sense, themselves postcolonial. (The recognition that colonial identity can never finally be eradicated might partially explain why the US is fixated with the concept of its independence – from the British – officially dated from 1776 and why, though the US has over 600 military installations around the world, it would never permit another country, even a very close ally, to garrison troops in their own bases on American soil.) But beyond the North American societies, the extension of the remit of postcolonial studies goes further still. Britain itself may be defined, in a variety of important respects, as postcolonial. Relinquishing its empire fundamentally changed British society and culture, as well as its importance within Europe and the world beyond. After the Second World War and the British exodus from India the country’s economic and political power declined rapidly across the globe. In the 1950s and 60s Britain took the decision to admit many tens of thousands of immigrants from its former colonies (renamed the Commonwealth countries), including those in the Caribbean, as well as India and Pakistan. These peoples settled in Britain and their presence has led to profound changes in the country’s culture and social life – at the most obvious level, for example, in cuisine and musical tastes. Britain’s former empire of subject peoples was recreated, displaced from these territories, in the ‘mother-country’ or metropolitan homeland – a process repeated to a lesser degree in the 1960s in France, Portugal, and Holland. All
these countries and their cultures have also become in this sense postcolonial. Art historians, then, are involved in a much more wide-ranging
investigation than those working in a single discipline may realise. Their studies of, for example, the power colonial regimes had in shaping the training of artists and designers in the territories they invaded and occupied – for example, the establishment of British art academies, such as the Calcutta Mechanics Institution and School of Art (founded 1854) – are part of a much broader radical social and cultural history of colonialism. Both traditional crafts activities and western notions of art and artistic production became meshed in the creation of this colonial culture. These societies – even after the retreat of the imperialists – were changed for ever in this process.
