The talk will take the exhibition ‘Another History of the World’ currently on view at the Mucem in Marseille as a starting point.
Co-curated by Pierre Singaravélou, the exhibition aims to present a decentred history of the world from the 13th to the 21st century. Without claiming to represent the world in its entirety, it invites visitors to abandon the Western perspective that is still dominant today, in order to focus on other points of view in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania, where sculptures, paintings, textiles, maps, archaeological objects, manuscripts and decorative arts give a different view of successive globalisations. These works allow us to understand the relationship to time and space of societies outside Europe, while highlighting their way of writing history. Lakota buffalo skin, Kanak engraved bamboo, Javanese historiated sarong, and Senegalese griot’s narrative testify to the infinite richness of vernacular historiographies.
As the curators of ‘Another History of the World’ remind us, the voyages and explorations of Arab, Asian and African merchants, pilgrims and scholars who ‘discovered’ distant lands and produced new knowledge would upset these so-called traditional conceptions of the world. African cowrie shells and Chinese navigational charts are a powerful reminder that globalisation was multipolar in Central Asia, the Indian Ocean and far beyond. In the wake of the progressive decompartmentalization of the globe, Europeans themselves became the subjects of numerous and sometimes confusing representations, and the world an object of multiple curiosities and encyclopaedic ambitions outside the West. Faced with the Eurocentric narrative produced by the colonial empires from the 17th century onwards, sovereigns, elites and artists of other continents have sought to reappropriate their history, sometimes drawing on Western practices, in order to stage their power or anti-colonial resistance. Today, new national novels allow them to rewrite their past by reinventing their relationship with the world. These are the narratives that the exhibition seeks to showcase through the display of over 150 works.
The talk will also provide the opportunity for Singaravélou to dicuss other collaborations he has led with museums, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée du Louvre where he held the Chaire du Louvre in 2022.
For more information on the Mucem exhibition, please see: https://www.mucem.org/en/another-history-world
Professor Pierre Singaravélou is a historian specialising in colonial empires and globalisation. He is a Professor at King’s College London and at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Among his recent publication with éditions du Seuil are Pour une histoire des possibles (2016, with Q. Deluermoz), Tianjin Cosmopolis (2017), Le Monde vu d’Asie (2018, with F. Argounès), Décolonisations (2020, with K. Miské and M. Ball), Les Mondes d’Orsay (2021) and with éditions Fayard books co-edited with Sylvain Venayre, L’Histoire du Monde au XIXe siècle (2017) and Le Magasin du Monde (2020).
Organised by Dr Devika Singh (Senior Lecturer in Curating, The Courtauld) as part of the Modern & Contemporary Lecture and Seminar Series.
