How do current debates about the need for a “global,” “world,” “transnational,” etc., art history relate to the discipline’s temporal organization? The historicist structure of Western art history with its teleologically inflected narrative seems increasingly inadequate to include the varied forms of time observed by different cultures. We will discuss how the radically different experiences of time might be related to one another. What are the strengths and weaknesses of translation as the “bridge” between peoples and temporalities? Can the discipline proceed without a dominant temporal paradigm with which times and cultures are compared? Must that be the time of those cultures and economies that dominate the political present?
Readings
- Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Reflections on World Art History,” Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel (London: Ashgate. 2015), 23-45.
- James Elkins, “Afterwords,” Circulations in the Global History of Art, 203-229.
- Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” Is Art History Global? (London: Routledge, 2007), 2-23.
- Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Consumption: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 2001) 4 vols., I, 311-332.
- Monica Juneja and Margrit Pernau, “Lost in Translation? Transcending Boundaries in Comparative History” Comparative and Transnational History ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jurgen Kocka (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), 105-129.