A Critical Globality: Transculturation and Potential Histories of Art

In Can Art History be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery (2023), Monica Juneja argues that an understanding of “global art” as universally constituted through unbounded global exchanges and circulation processes “threatens to foreclose more nuanced explorations of the cultural field.” She advocates instead for “a critical globality” that can “empower a rethinking of the global in the domain of art, and its theorization as a new ‘cosmopolitics of resistance’, as a resource for countering the logic of neo-liberal capital and neo-nationalist cultural politics.” For Juneja, the keystone concept of transculturation grounds an art history not reliant on fixed frameworks, which instead examines histories of transcultural encounters and negotiations and accounts for complex structures of knowledge and power. Juneja intervenes equally decisively in art historiographical debates in Germany and those engaged with the Global South, by drawing on literatures from the early modern period to the present, particularly in her field of South Asian art. She ultimately seeks a “potential” art history, which she describes “as a way of bringing unasked questions about the past, suppressed or elided possibilities to the forefront of art-historical narratives.”

This panel solicits papers that engage Juneja’s thought and/or explore the potentialities of transculturation as concept and method. Of particular interest are challenges to naturalized disciplinary assumptions and practices, to the discipline’s reliance upon national histories, to understandings of the global as an effect of global capitalism, to models of center and periphery, and to cultural or ethnic essentialisms.