Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s
Kobena Mercer is Professor of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. He is author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, editor of Cosmopolitan Modernisms, among other titles, and an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.
Art History after Globalization: Formations of the Colonial Modern
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Published:April 2016
Summing up insights from the Annotating Art’s Histories series, which introduced methods for the comparative study of modernism on a global scale, this chapter argues that problems of presentism and inclusionism that preserve monocultural narratives of modern art can best be overcome by taking account of the multiple modernities thesis in theories of globalization put forward in the sociology of culture. Rather than an additive or supplemental model, conjunctural analysis of cross-cultural dynamics in the colonial encounter, whether in Aboriginal Australia, preindependence India, or modern Nigeria, enables a holistic understanding of interdependent transactions in which the agency of selective appropriation...
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