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Partisan Aesthetics
Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with conjunctural and climactic histories of late-colonial and postcolonial India, to foreground political, social, and intellectual formations of modern art during India's long decolonization.
Partisan Aesthetics
Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India's Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political parti...
How Secular Is Art?
As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of 'art' and 'secular' in their theoretical and historical implications. It questions the temporal, spatial and cultural binaries between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent – one, fissured by histories of partition, state formations and religious nationalisms, but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art's deep entanglements with the politics of the present?
Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia
"This book explores aesthetic forms of the left to negotiate the political frontiers of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film and literature to illuminate interconnections across regions and countries, and discuss the shifting political contours of the region during the latter half of the 20th century. With a clear focus and conceptualization this volume raises two key questions; how left-wing art generated cultural and social formations, and how aesthetic forms held political value across the region. Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, it traces the trajectori...
Constructing an Avant-Garde
How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil’s avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely...
Rethinking Markets in Modern India
Using historical and ethnographic analyses, this book shows how Indian markets are embedded in society and politically contested.
Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain
This volume, edited by Éva Forgács, with contributions from art historians from across Europe and the Americas, analyzes the artistic initiatives of the short time span between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. In this moment, a new internationalism was anticipated by retrieving pre-war modernism, as well as creating the new era's new artistic lingua franca. The chapters include in-depth case studies that analyze the complex, often interconnected, projects throughout the world—South America and Eastern and Western Europe—that were soon ended by the Cold War.
Inter-Asia in Motion
This book explores dance and choreography as sites for the articulation of new theoretical and historical paradigms in inter-Asia cultural studies. The chapters in this volume cover a wide range of dance works, artists, genres, and media, from Kathak to K-pop flash mob dance, from Cold War diplomacy to avant-garde dance collaborations, and from festival dance to dance on screen. Working against the Western-centric category of “Asian dance” and Western-centric theorizations of intercultural performance that foreground “East-West” relationships, each contribution shows how dances in Asia make one another as their key aesthetic references beyond Eurocentric influences, as well as how in...
Nobody's People
What if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us into a "caste of thieves" in northern India, Nobody's People depicts hierarchy as a normative idiom through which people imagine better lives and pursue social ambitions. Failing to find a place inside hierarchic relations, the book's heroes are "nobody's people": perceived as worthless, disposable and so open to being murdered with no regret or remorse. Following their journey between death and hope, we learn to perceive vertical, non-equal relations as a social good, not only in rural Rajasthan, but also in much of the world—including settings stridently committed to equality. Challenging egalo-normative commitments, Anastasia Piliavsky asks scholars across the disciplines to recognize hierarchy as a major intellectual resource.
The Poet’s Song
This book explores the ‘folk’ performance genre of Kobigaan, a dialogic song-theatre form in which performers verse-duel, in contemporary West Bengal in India and Bangladesh. Thought to be a nearly extinct form, the book shows how the genre is still prevalent in the region. The author shows how like many other ‘folk’ practices in South and South-East Asia, the content and format of this genre has undergone vital changes thus raising questions of authenticity, patronage and cultural politics. She captures live performances of Kobigaan through ethnographies spread across borders — from village rituals to urban festivals, and from Bengali cinema to television and new media. While unde...
