ARTHIST 432A: Global Modernisms: Theories, Methods, Narratives

Course Description

Recent decades have seen growing interests in "global" studies in art history and the humanities more broadly. Amid the near euphoria of these and related discourses in the art world - which tend to celebrate more than critically assess a new era of global interconnectedness - it is necessary to trace the genealogy of such ideas to the late 19th century, when the world became linked in unprecedented ways through a vast, remodeled colonial system. From that moment, European art practices and pedagogies spread through and beyond the colonies, and modernist movements emerged outside the West in dialogue with earlier and parallel movements in Europe. Global histories of modern art raise issues about the circulation of ideas across cultures, artistic media, geographical regions, national borders, political and religious ideologies, and historical periods. Noting how artworks and practices traveled between East and West, rural and urban areas, colonies and metropolitan centers - that is, across a spatially and culturally diffuse modernity, accompanied by inevitable time lags and interpretive discordances - this seminar deals with the theories, methods, and narratives of global modern art history, exploring a range of thorny questions. To what extent should modernisms arising outside the West be counted as products of disparate ("alternative" or "multiple") global modernities, or as forms of opposition (or capitulation) to Western avant-gardes? How shall the cultural and spatiotemporal disjunctions inherent in global modernisms be bridged methodologically? Does the very term "global" risk misleading us unless we can find ways of thinking beyond Western-oriented epistemological models, and of working within this impossibly broad framework to analyze diverse yet sustained patterns of border-crossing?