Realism in the Anti-Colonialist Century

What promises did realism hold for artists during the anti-colonial movement? Building on the recent urgency to decenter histories of twentieth-century art and the debates in epistemology over post-colonial interconnecting versus “decolonial delinking,” to use Walter D. Mignolo’s term, this panel invites contributions that rethink realism through its entanglements with histories of anti-colonialism. At the same time, this panel hopes to draw attention to the internal multiplicities of anti-colonialism, understanding it not just as a struggle for national independence but more broadly as a crucial ingredient of various socialist, anti-imperialist, internationalist, and federationalist projects, ranging from Négritude to the Non-Aligned Movement and Pan-Arabism. Realism has been divergently understood, among other descriptions, as a social critique; an affirmative aesthetic; a specialized skill set; a measure of reality; a style; a relentless portrayal of everyday life; a choreography in allegorical typification; or a prophecy of an idealized future to come. This panel asks questions such as: How did anti-colonialist embraces of realism relay and reconfigure its nineteenth-century (chiefly French) precedents? What were the infrastructures through which realism circulated across nation-states, cultures, and ideological divides? How did the import and export of realism relate to the project of modernization and the concomitant discourse of modernism? What are the ways in which attention to affects and feelings can reframe accounts of realism and its political methods? With an aim to foster comparisons across cultures, ideologies, and regions, this panel solicits submissions that conceptualize realism from a broad array of geographies and contexts.