Explore the vast range of titles available.

In 'Art to Come' Terry Smith--who is widely recognized as one of the world's leading historians and theorists of contemporary art--traces the emergence of contemporary art and further develops his concept of contemporaneity. Smith shows that embracing contemporaneity as both a historical concept and a condition of the globalized world allows us to grasp how contemporary art exists in a fluid space of increasing interdependencies, multiple contemporaneous modernities, and persistent inequalities. Throughout these essays, Smith offers systematic proposals for writing contemporary art's histories while assessing how curators, critics, philosophers, artists, and art historians are currently doing so. Among other topics, Smith examines the intersection of architecture with other visual arts, Chinese art since the Cultural Revolution, how philosophers are theorizing concepts associated with the contemporary, Australian Indigenous art, and the current state of art history.

Explores how the contemporary Indian artist challenges colonial photography of indigenous peoples and exposes its anachronistic portrayal of history. Focuses on three photographs from her series ‘Native women of South India’ (2000–2004) to discuss the ways that she transforms herself into both the exoticised and essentialised ‘native’ and the anthropologist, using mise en scène, performance and mimicry to reject dominant colonial misrepresentations. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.

Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute) is a performance and visual artist whose work deals explicitly in decolonizing the contemporary experience of Indigenous peoples. An analysis of his performance ofWhite Indian in 2016 at the Denver Art Museum opens up the possibilities of performance as a method for museums to decolonize their spaces and curation. 

This essay discusses issues of time and temporality in relation to performance art from the Dominican Republic. It contends that Dominican performance artists are advancing critical understandings of what is to be contemporary. The essay considers the work of David Pérez “Karmadavis,” Sayuri Guzmán, and José Ramia as expressing the role of artists in defining and delving into what it means to make art in and of the present, while simultaneously challenging the presentist understanding of time linked to neoliberalism. From this perspective, the article examines the potential of performance art for criticizing and expanding our understanding of time and temporality. El presente ensayo aborda cuestiones de tiempo y temporalidad a partir del arte performativo dominicano. El principal argumento defendido en estas páginas consiste en afirmar que los artistas de performance de la República Dominicana están proponiendo ideas críticas y radicales acerca de lo que significa ser contemporáneo/a. El artículo analiza la obra de David Pérez “Karmadavis”, Sayuri Guzmán y José Ramia como ejemplos del papel que los artistas llevan a cabo a la hora de definir y problematizar las implicaciones de hacer arte en y del presente, manteniendo al mismo tiempo un posicionamiento crítico en relación a la interpretación del tiempo presentista y unilateral asociada con el neoliberalismo. Desde esta perspectiva, el ensayo destaca la importancia del performance para cuestionar y ampliar nuestra percepción del tiempo y la temporalidad.

This article explores the impact of Afrocubanismo on the development of Cuba’s arts during the 1940s and 1950s. The article follows the discursive output of artists, intellectuals, and cultural policymakers of different racial backgrounds over the deployment of lo negro to construct cubanidad. It argues that, if the 1920s and 1930s experienced a movement towards the construction of a homogeneous mestizo Cuba, the following decades reveal an effort by some artists to desyncretize lo cubano. While some intellectuals constructed notions of authenticity that circumscribed black art to black artists, many white Cuban artists in turn embraced elite Hispanic heritage as their main creative language while valorizing some Afro-Cuban artists’ recreations of lo negro. The article also demonstrates that the scholarly debates about cultural appropriation in recent decades have a long history within the Afro-Cuban community. It shows how Afro-Cuban artists and intellectuals pioneered arguments about the exploitative use of lo negro to make national art and the central role of culture in shaping racial inequality. Este artículo estudia la influencia del Movimiento Afrocubanista en el desarrollo de las artes cubanas durante las décadas de 1940 y 1950. El trabajo se enfoca en la producción discursiva de artistas, intelectuales y gestores de políticas culturales de diferentes identidades raciales y su uso de lo negro para construir nociones de cubanidad. Sostiene que, si las décadas de 1920 y 1930 experimentaron un movimiento hacia la construcción de una Cuba mestiza y homogénea, las décadas siguientes revelan un esfuerzo de algunos artistas por desincretizar lo cubano. Si bien algunos intelectuales construyeron nociones de autenticidad que circunscribían el arte negro a los artistas afrocubanos, muchos artistas blancos a su vez adoptaron la cultura hispánica de élite como su principal eje creativo al tiempo que valorizaban lo negro dentro del trabajo de algunos artistas afrocubanos. El artículo también demuestra que los debates académicos de las últimas décadas sobre apropiación cultural tienen una larga historia dentro de las comunidades afrocubanas, mostrando cómo sus artistas e intelectuales se opusieron a las formas explotadoras del uso de su cultura para hacer arte nacional, y destacaron ya desde aquella época el papel central del arte en la configuración de la desigualdad racial.

More than a thousand years ago on the north coast of Peru, Indigenous Moche artists created a large and significant corpus of sexually explicit ceramic works of art. They depicted a diversity of sex organs and sex acts, and an array of solitary and interconnected human and nonhuman bodies. To the modern eye, these Moche “sex pots,” as Mary Weismantel calls them, are lively and provocative but also enigmatic creations whose import to their original owners seems impossible to grasp.In Playing with Things, Weismantel shows that there is much to be learned from these ancient artifacts, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own inhuman temporality. From a new materialist perspective, she fills the gaps left by other analyses of the sex pots in pre-Columbian studies, where sexuality remains marginalized, and in sexuality studies, where non-Western art is largely absent. Taking a decolonial approach toward an archaeology of sexuality and breaking with long-dominant iconographic traditions, this book explores how the pots play jokes, make babies, give power, and hold water,” considering the sex pots as actual ceramic bodies that interact with fleshly bodies, now and in the ancient past. A beautifully written study that will be welcomed by students as well as specialists, Playing with Things is a model for archaeological and art historical engagement with the liberating power of queer theory and Indigenous studies.

In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the \"West.\" Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism—including citizenship and equality—were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.

Enoch Powell's explosive rhetoric against black immigration and anti-discrimination law transformed the terrain of British race politics and cast a long shadow over British society. Using extensive archival research, Camilla Schofield offers a radical reappraisal of Powell's political career and insists that his historical significance is inseparable from the political generation he sought to represent. Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain follows Powell's trajectory from an officer in the British Raj to the centre of British politics and, finally, to his turn to Ulster Unionism. She argues that Powell and the mass movement against 'New Commonwealth' immigration that he inspired shed light on Britain's war generation, popular understandings of the welfare state and the significance of memories of war and empire in the making of postcolonial Britain. Through Powell, Schofield illuminates the complex relationship between British social democracy, racism and the politics of imperial decline in Britain.

Based on three decades of fieldwork throughout the developing world,Scars of Partitionis the first book to systematically evaluate the long-term implications of French and British styles of colonialism and decolonization for ordinary people throughout the so-called Third World. It pays particular attention to the contemporary legacies of artificial boundaries superimposed by Britain and France that continue to divide indigenous peoples into separate postcolonial states. In so doing, it uniquely illustrates how the distinctive stamps of France and Britain continue to mark daily life along and behind these inherited borders in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Caribbean. Scars of Partitiondraws on political science, anthropology, history, and geography to examine six cases of indigenous, indentured, and enslaved peoples partitioned by colonialism in West Africa, West Indies, South Pacific, Southeast Asia, South India, and the Indian Ocean. William F. S. Miles demonstrates that sovereign nations throughout the developing world, despite basic differences in culture, geography, and politics, still bear the underlying imprint of their colonial pasts. Disentangling and appreciating these embedded colonial legacies is critical to achieving full decolonization-particularly in their borderlands.

Shakry explores the idea of a \"history without documents,\" first by outlining the material inaccessibility of postcolonial state archives in the Middle East, and second by questioning the compositional logics of archival imaginaries of decolonization. She also determines the ways historians have remembered, forgotten, or appropriated the various intellectual traditions that belonged to the era of decolonization in the Middle East. By shifting people's attention away from dominant and declensionist narratives of decolonization as a state-driven and secular political process so as to include members of the intelligentsia, social scientists, and religious thinkers, who are by-passed in or excised from traditional archives, she suggests that they might better see decolonization as \"an ongoing process and series of struggles rather than a finite event, as regional as well as national, intellectual and cultural as well as political, and religious as well as secular.\"